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Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth in Niels Arden Oplev's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. [Photo: Music Box Films] The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo *

by Ed Gonzalez on March 15, 2010   Jump to Comments (3) or Add Your Own

Swedes may have better access to health care than we do, but their taste in movies is apparently every bit as questionable as ours. Based on the first part of the late Stieg Larsson's "Millennium Trilogy," The Girl with the Dragon Tatto has become the most successful film in Swedish history, no doubt for how slavishly it plays to its audience's thirst for cheap sensationalism. Director Niels Arden Oplev essentially gives his people a Da Vinci Code to call their own, rife with the familiar intrigue—and then some—of your average mass market paperback: rape, incest, serial murder, Nazis, and a shitload of clue-solving. The story pairs a disgraced financial journalist, Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), with a punky and mysteriously dour computer hacker, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), on a mission to solve the 40-year-old disappearance—and possible murder—of Harriet Vanger from her family's remote island enclave. The investigation is essentially a means for Mikael, whose crimes are reported early on with the sort of media gusto usually accorded to a celebrity death or Lady Gaga costume change, to restore his reputation, and for Lisbeth a journey toward a personal reckoning with the shady past that clearly informs her fondness for piercings, tattoos, and the color black—and no doubt connects to the fierce rage she feels when she shoves a dildo up the ass of the ghoulish guardian who rapes her in exchange for the money she needs to support her tech-toy habit. The storyline grows increasingly lurid by the second, feeling like a distillation of the soap-operatic plot reveals and twists of a dozen V.C. Andrews novels, and it's visually expressed using the cliché tricks of hand long perfected and advanced by the likes of Ron Howard—all flashbacks, voiceovers, power montages, superimpositions, and power pans. You watch this slick, headache-inducing piece of trash in constant awe of how much lower it could possibly go.

  • Director(s): Niels Arden Oplev
  • Screenplay: Nikolaj Arcel, Rasmus Heisteerberg
  • Cast: Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre, Peter Haber, Sven-Bertil Taube, Peter Andersson, Ingvar Hirdwall, Marika Lagercrantz, Björn Granath, Ewa Fröling, Michalis Koutsogiannakis, Annika Hallin, Sofia Ledrap
  • Distributor: Music Box Films
  • Runtime: 152 min.
  • Rating: NR
  • Year: 2009

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Comments

Suzanne_Day on April 15, 2010, 12:31 PM

You and the rest of the film criticism community must not have seen the same film.

Rob Humanick on September 5, 2010, 02:35 AM

Typical comment, in that "the rest of" means "the majority of those I care enough to know about". I just recently slogged my way through this p.o.s. and have to question the taste of those who like it. Then again, those same people mostly liked "A Beautiful Mind," too.

pussywagon_95 on December 15, 2011, 07:19 PM

Typical comment from slant magazine. Evidently, this film is never going to be as good as the book. But to rate it one star out of 4 is fucking ridiculous, obviously the film can never be as good as the book but it's a pretty fucking good adaptation of it.

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