The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - Review
Review by Cassam Looch
THE long-awaited big screen treatment for the hugely popular Millenium series of books has finally arrived… and you might well be left wondering what all the fuss is about. Sure it’s a complex thriller, but it’s not significantly better than the likes of Edge of Darkness (although rest assured it is significantly longer!)
The film is set in modern day Sweden and the plot tries its hardest to combine several strands into one cohesive story and to this end it is a success. But by the end you probably won’t care enough about any of the characters to think it worth your while.
One fateful day many years ago, Harriet Vanger disappears off the secluded island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger family. There is no corpse, no witnesses and no evidence.
Forty years later, investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist reluctantly accepts the unusual and seemingly unsolvable assignment of finding out what really happened to Harriet.
Mikael has been disgraced in an ongoing political scandal and his attempts to clear his name appear to be going nowhere. His emails and personal information have been the source of much speculation and this soon leads him to some unexpected help on the case.
Skilled but troubled hacker, Lisbeth Salander – aka ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ – is drawn into the case and the two form a fragile alliance as they dig into the sinister past of the Vangers and find out just how far they’re prepared to go to protect themselves – and each other.
Salander is played with great zeal by Noomi Rapace and the character is distant yet engrossing. The film opens with an interesting subplot which introduces us to her miserable existence but it feels like this has little to do with the rest of the film or the greater conspiracy at play.
She may end up as a great and iconic feminist hero (there is one particular scene which practically demands this) but for the most part, she is left on the sideline as Mikael blunders around the Vanger Estate looking for clues.
The film is full of the kind of convenient coincidences and unlikely exposition that would be derided in a conventional Hollywood thriller. One suspects that just because this film is European, and has some flashes of originality (although not many after the hour mark), it is given the benefit of the doubt and allowed to continue on its merry way.
The locations look wonderful and the sense of time and place are accurately recreated but to what purpose?
The ‘villain’ remains faceless for the most part and the charisma-free leading man can hardly hold your attention for more than five minutes. The buzz would have you believe that this is a 5-star attention grabber… but for the majority of the film, where Salander and her well hidden Tattoo are off screen, you will struggle to stay with it.
There may well be vast swathes of plot lost in translation and there is certainly a place for focused and intricate storytelling in genre films like this, but we’d need more of a central core to want to return to the series for the inevitable sequels which are already on their way.
In Swedish, with subtitles
Certificate: 18
Running time: 2hrs 30mins
UK Release Date: March 12, 2010