The Girl in the Spider’s Web is a generic action movie that erases its protagonist’s identity in favor of cheap thrills and dull conflict.

In 2012, Sony helped bring The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to the big screen. Adapted from a best-selling Swedish novel by deceased author Stieg Larsson, the movie wasn’t exactly the hit they hoped for. Directed by David Fincher and starring Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig, the movie garnered strong critical praise and five Oscar nominations (including a win for best editing), however, it faltered at the box office. As such, the studio never moved forward with the planned sequels. Until now.

Using The Girl in the Spider’s Web as a soft reboot for the franchise, Sony hired brand new talent to lead the film. Fede Alvarez (Don’t Breathe, Evil Dead) signed on to direct and Claire Foy (The Crown, First Man) was cast into the iconic lead role as Lisbeth Salander.

Unfortunately, the fruits of their labor leave a lot to be desired.

The opening minutes of Alvarez’s Spider’s Web begin with the exact same scene shown at the beginning of the movie’s first theatrical trailer (which I hope you haven’t seen as it reveals almost the entire movie and I’m not exaggerating). We see a man apologizing to his wife who sits on the floor shaking and beaten, having just been assaulted by her husband. Enter Salander.

She ties him up and quickly dictates all of his wrongs — both personal and business-related — that led to this moment. She tells him she wired all his money to his victims, including his wife. Lisbeth instructs the wife to take her child and run, leaving the man strung up by his feet, powerless and defeated.

I promise not to dwell too much on the comparisons between Spider’s Web and the 2011 Dragon Tattoo, but it’s hard to ignore them when it’s so blatantly obvious. This scene in particular is meant to serve an almost identical purpose to one in Fincher’s film where Lisbeth ties up and brands her attacker with a permanent tattoo, blackmailing him into giving her back her financial autonomy.

Like so much of The Girl in the Spider’s Web this scene is just a boring copycat job, meant to capture the atmosphere and feeling of Fincher’s film in a way that lacks any of the same depth of character or story. Lisbeth’s introduction in the movie serves no purpose other than to jumpstart an uninspired yet completely palatable superhero narrative that excoriates Lisbeth’s identity in favor of a James Bond-esque character that never fails.

To make matters worse, the movie sloppily introduces the two other major plot points minutes into the first act — Lisbeth’s sister and a computer program called FireFall.

In a flashback, we see young Lisbeth playing chess with her sister. After a brief introduction of Lisbeth’s abusive father, we see her make an abrupt escape, leaving her sister behind. With a single scene, the movie completely upends any possible surprise or dramatic tension the movie had.

With the introduction of Lisbeth’s sister, The Girl in the Spider’s Web becomes a waiting game; not only waiting for the movie to be over, but waiting for Lisbeth’s sister to finally show up for her inevitable confrontation. Again, this entire plot point is ridiculously laid out in the film’s theatrical trailer, which makes actually watching the movie an exercise in patience.

However, before Lisbeth’s showdown with her sister, the movie details the chase for FireFall, a computer program that allows users access to every nuclear arsenal around the world. At the beginning of the film, the National Security Agency (NSA) has control of the program. Lisbeth steals it from them, then the program gets stolen from Lisbeth, and so on and so forth.

It’s here that the movie abandons any hope or possibility for offering a compelling or even entertaining story. The Girl in the Spider’s Web is nothing more than a cat-and-mouse slog that derives its dramatic stakes from a good old cliché: nuclear weapons. We know, of course, that Lisbeth will get FireFall back eventually because this isn’t going to the movie that ends in a nuclear holocaust.

For better or worse, this plot feels straight out of a Mission: Impossible or James Bond movie. That wouldn’t be so bad if the movie managed to have a modicum of fun, but it inhabits such a self-serious space that no amount of car chases or shoot outs can save this from feeling like an imitation of far more successful movies.

The Girl in the Spider’s Web simply misses the point about what made this story and these characters compelling in the first place. Lisbeth, a character previously shown to be incredibly intelligent yet entirely fallible, is replaced by a one-dimensional super-genius with obscene hacking powers (she can control anything with a few taps from her phone).

Moreover, the world she inhabits is extraordinarily bland. Whereas the source material and previous movie adaptations articulated the complicated intersection of corrupt power, toxic masculinity, and systemic abuse, Spider’s Web reduces this world to elementary moral conflicts with as much depth as a kiddie pool.

As if that all weren’t enough, The Girl in the Spider’s Web is riddled with remarkably boring choices that serve to make this an even more generic action movie. The music in the movie sounds like it belongs in a biopic about a politician, not a thriller centered around a Swedish hacker. Supporting characters including Mikael Blomkvist (Lisbeth’s former lover and investigative partner) are reduced to mechanisms for delivering exposition rather than meaningfully contributing to the story.

While Claire Foy has earned praise for her work on The Crown and in other films including Unsane and First Man, her performance in Spider’s Web leaves a lot to be desired. While the writing is surely doing her no favors, she brings nothing to this role that leaves any lasting impression. Foy, like everything about this movie, is safe.

Was it Sony’s intention to turn this franchise into an exceedingly basic, palatable action movie that completely eschews the complicated investigative and journalistic elements that defined the previous films? If so, they succeed. The Girl in the Spider’s Web is thoroughly risk-averse, which is a serious fault to find in a movie that’s meant to inspire excitement and thrill from the audience.

Unfortunately, what we are left with is a boring and derivative thriller stripped of any real identity. This story can be, should be, and has been better.

Save yourself a trip to the movie theater and rent David Fincher’s version instead. You won’t be sorry.