Having seen this slooooow pot boiler a few months ago, I’m hugely surprised to see the plethora of five-star reviews adorning its stylish poster campaign.
Approaching this as someone unfamiliar with the hugely successful Swedish source novel by late author Stieg Larsson (important to note in offering.
A critique of a book-to-screen adaptation), it turned out to be a mildly diverting, sporadically intriguing, ambitiously sprawling thriller, that’s in the end a tad bit dull. That’s not a poster quote you’d want to see.
Forty years ago, a member of an affluent family vanished from the estate, and her disappearance remains unsolved. Convinced that it was murder, her uncle hires a controversial journalist (Mikael Nyqvist) and the tattooed titular hacker (Noomi Rapace) to unearth the family secrets. Upturning stones and linking her whereabouts to numerous gruesome murders spanning four decades brings much unwanted attention that tests our detective duo’s willingness to push the case even further.
Strangely enough, the film that this draws immediate comparisons with is Ron Howard’s lamentable adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, a film so literal and exposition heavy in translation from the page that you’d expect Tom Hanks to be reading his lines directly from the book. I’m not suggesting for a minute that this is anywhere near as bad as that, indeed it’s refreshing how “un-Hollywood” it is with its approach, but it does suffer from that same episodic structure that affects any film intent on cramming too much story into an already bloated running time.
This results in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo feeling like three movies in one. Part one is an hour of intense, and at times explicitly gruelling, character development; part two is the internet search engine assisted investigation; and then the final, and strongest act, is The Silence of the Lambs (to which this owes a huge debt) game of cat and mouse. Hopefully this approach will pay dividends when the upcoming sequels, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, are released later this year.
The benefit of the prolonged set-up is that it helps to establish, along with intermittent flashbacks, a really interesting anti-hero in Rapace’s Lisbeth. Think Clarisse Starling in a leather jacket; a tortured (literally) soul that conveys strength her small frame belies. Her motivations are guarded and her actions very unpredictable, it’s the occasional dropping of her veil that maintains the narrative intrigue much more than the Murder She Wrote whodunit.
Pulse raising moments are a rarity; investigations are of the Zodiac variety, lots of photograph purveying and chin scratching while spouting theories. You have to wait until the finale for anything that isn’t pedestrian in execution. This is not a scathing criticism, just a warning to be prepared to pay attention.
An admirable fusion of arthouse sensibilities and an extremely dark exploration of the macabre, this is by no means a classic, often feeling like it could have benefited from being a Red Riding style mini-series, but it features a strong debut performance that just about saves it from being a disappointment.
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