The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is based on the first voluminous volume of the posthumously popular Millennium trilogy by Sweden’s Stieg Larsson. The last of the subtitled “Girl” films had barely left theatres when this English version hit the horizon so series fanatic might have expected to at least see the angular beauty of Noomi Rapace reprise the inked-up role of Lisbeth Salander. However for Rapace fans this year she’s the girl next door at the Cineplex working with Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes. The well pierced super hacker is played here by Rooney Mara who is full of surprises. She actually manages to take the character to a more intense level and she’s about the only cast member that sounds Swedish. Daniel Craig doesn’t even try but the wandering accents attempted by can-do actors like Christopher Plummer and Robin Wright (Erika Berger) make one wonder if they were desperately trying to avoid sounding like an Ikea commercial. Okay, Stellan Skarsgård as Martin Vanger gets it right too - but he was born in Sweden. There is a lot of cool mystery solving to do here as the Kodak Brownie meets the Adobe Photoshop so (without dragging at all) the film needs its 158 minutes to tell the tale. It’s actually two stories running in tandem until they converge when disgraced Millennium magazine publisher Mikael Blomkvist (Craig) needs an assistant for his research into the decades old disappearance of the niece of Henrik Vanger (Plummer) the patriarch of a Swedish corporate dynasty. Their investigation uncovers family Nazis and Vanger incest not to mention all of Lisbeth’s extensive body art. It’s often the case that English remakes of stellar foreign films have their grit extracted but not so here – even though Salanders brutal rape at the hands of her sadistic state guardian is shortened it’s every bit as graphic and shocking (ditto her retribution) as in the 2009 version. But will this Girl with the Dragon Tattoo also leave as indelible a mark? Well let’s just say you’ll probably leave the theatre anxious to see Mara’s interpretation of The Girl Who Played with Fire.