Movie Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I’ll be right up front in saying I enjoyed this movie. It may not be the movie I was hoping it would be (it was directed by the amazing David Fincher after all), but I feel it did the best possible job it could have with the book’s source material. I haven’t actually read the Dragon Tattoo books–I tried and really couldn’t get into them, finding them to be standard mystery books disguised as more than that by a moody Swedish atmosphere–but I did see the Swedish films of this book trilogy or at least the first two of them. This movie blows them out of the water.

What Works: Fincher directs this thing with as much skill as anyone possibly could and his technical mastery comes out in hundreds of small ways. Daniel Craig is at his most likable in years just by playing someone who isn’t a cold-blooded killer for once, and he commands the screen with an alert, intellectual crispness that should feel routine from him but doesn’t. Still, the movie’s biggest find is Rooney Mara as the infamous title character. What she does–and what Naomi Rapace didn’t do in the Swedish version–is give Lisbeth Salander an erotic, curious vulnerability that makes her infinitely more interesting than just a typical badass heroine. The movie itself isn’t as deep as one would hope, but Mara’s performance is, and it more than gives you reason to think there’s enough material there to warrant the sequels.

What Doesn’t Work: Nothing in this movie is bad necessarily, just some sections are more interesting than others. There’s a big chunk of the movie devoted to the actual mystery that feels like the most boring section (not such a good thing for a private investigator movie). Plus, I had a hard time keeping all of the names and suspects straight–the movie feels almost deliberately confusing–and that kept me from really getting involved in the way I wanted to. As a result, I mostly just focused on the only three actors I had ever seen in anything before, and right there, it cut the suspect pool in half for me. Also, for all the talk of the movie’s violence, I actually thought it might have been too tame (there’s only one sequence of genuine brutality in it) and could have benefited from going more off the rails as several sections threaten to put you to sleep.

What I Would Have Done Differently: It’s hard to say because I haven’t read the novels that these movies are based on and suspect the movie might be the rare movie that’s better than the book. The parts of the movie that feel the weakest seem directly lifted from the book’s clunky structure. So, ultimately, I’m not sure how much Fincher really could have changed even if he wanted to. Still, I couldn’t help thinking what a director like Fincher could have done if he’d completely departed from the book (like the opening credits sequence which suggest something infinitely sicker and more unique than what we wind up with).