The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [18]

It starts with a great cover of a Led Zep track...and that's it. A turkey of enormous proportions: no edgyness, no weirdness, no Swedishness. I reckon the director must have written the film from a review of the original and made up the rest...it certainly had nothing to do with the book. And where was Daniel Craig's Swedish accent? Who does he think he is, Sean Connery? Oops - I forgot: he already is...

moviemoghul (Unverified), 10/01/12

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I don't think this film is a punishment at all. In fact I suddenly saw the point of a different language version coming out soon after the original. It brings out different aspects of the story - much like different performances of Shakespeare might all be worth their salt but give you a different viewpoint. You can't have two versions in the same language so soon because of rights. Change the language and you get round all that.

So here a different selection of story elements and retained and chopped. We get Lisbeth Salander's heartbreaking loss of trust in Blomqvist and lose a trip to Oz, for instance. But this version, like the original, has been made by someone who knows and likes the books.

Rooney Mara's performance owes a lot to Noomi Rapace, but this Salander is not as coherent a character - her spikiness comes off in the wash. The buildup to her dealings with her evil guardian don't have the suspence of Rapace's. Daniel Craig is good as Blomqvist - less of a hero, more a geeky researcher, perhaps to get away from his Bond. A little.

The title sequence is totally unlike the rest of the film but it lets you in on the sense of humour behind it. The director trumpets "We have Bond captive!" But this time it's no 70s silhouette softporn. Now the girls have the power and they're not afraid to keep the men in line.

Jen Pawsey (DI Reviewer), 05/01/12

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A just punishment for those who prefer films without subtitles, David Fincher’s Dragon Tattoo misses every beat of the book - and of the Swedish version of the film.

Unsubtle and telegraphed, as American storytelling can often be, this Dragon Tattoo is a one dimensional affair. Despite a running time as fat as the book, it fails to wring the necessary drama from the latent menace, tenderness, sorrow or horror within Stieg Larsson’s story.

Mikhail Blomkvist, a radical journalist, is on the wrong end of a court judgment after penning an investigative article about the Wennerstrom Corporation. Henrik Vanger, the head of a family company, hires Blomkvist to look into the disappearance and death of his niece forty years earlier. But penetrating the peculiarities of the Vanger family let alone the myriad pieces of evidence requires specialist help. Cue the girl with the dragon tattoo, punk hacker, Lisbeth Salander.

A story involving corporate corruption, ritual murder, sexual predation and family dysfunction offers much scope for shock and tension, as Larsson’s sales figures showed. But Fincher has given Salander too little to do and saddled most of the film with Daniel Craig’s serviceable but stuffy Blomkvist.

Crucially, there’s no inking-in of Salander’s or Blomkvist’s characters. No reason then to believe in their attraction, no pulse at the heart of the story. Show not tell is an axiom of cinema but Fincher blows it – with Steve Zallian’s script – by telling us of Salander’s painful past rather visualising it. And repeats the trick in scenes that are powerful ‘reveals’ in the book, and in the Swedish film, but fall flat here.

Fincher’s decision to imbue the piece with a bleak, grey visuals and cranked up sounds works to a point but mistakes style for substance. Perfunctory film making can get by when you don’t know the story. But millions do and will spot the join-the-dots follies on show. Even the simple poignancy of Vanger’s receipt, each year, of a pressed-flower picture on the anniversary of his niece’s disappearance is skipped over.

From the off, with a bold Bond-like title montage, Fincher seems to get the dark heart of the film. Looking like an oil-slick in a Goth-accessory shop, it’s a sequence that throbs with menace, darkness and destructive claustrophobia – which is exactly the point of Larsson’s story and what the Swedish film managed to portray.

But the investigation that follows, the horror of the murders, the dangers to Blomkvist and the volatility of Salander are unmined seams. Craig, tantalisingly, lacks full dimension as Blomkvist; Rooney Mara is luminously fragile and prickly as Lisbeth. And it’s great to see cameos from Brits like Geraldine James and Martin Jarvis amid bigger names such as Christopher Plummer as Vanger and Stellan Skarsgard as his bullish son.

Only in the ending – or in the coda to the ending – does Fincher nail a key sadness within the book. Bravely downbeat, even the Swedish version edged away from that. And by then you’re starting to care…which only makes you wish the rest of the film had been as deftly handled.

Glenn Watson (DI Reviewer), 03/01/12

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