Review: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Daniel Craig plays a disgraced journalist in Sweden employed by rich retiree Christopher Plummer to write his biography. However, he has another reason: He wants Craig to find out which member of his family was responsible for killing his niece in 1964. The girl went missing, but her body was never found and is assumed to be dead. It’s a cold case that Plummer has never been able to find peace with, and he truly believes a member of his own eccentric family (which includes the odd Nazi) is involved. To help Craig in his investigation, he hires a bisexual, troubled computer hacker (Rooney Mara) to be his research assistant. Stellan Skarsgaard plays Plummer’s nephew and the missing girl’s brother who now runs the family (big) business. Steven Berkoff is Plummer’s lawyer who puts Craig in contact with Mara. Robin Wright plays Craig’s boss and lover, Joely Richardson is another relative of Plummer’s, and Julian Sands appears in flashbacks as Plummer’s younger self. Embeth Davidtz gets even shorter shrift as Craig’s estranged wife (ex-wife?).

You’re all gonna hate me for this, so you’ve been duly warned. I’ve been reviewing films online for about a decade now (and for my own personal amusement long before that), and I don’t normally watch a remake of a film before seeing the original, but; a) I’ve heard the original was originally intended for TV, so that doesn’t interest me much, as a cinematic purist, and b) I was bored, it was available to me, and there was nothing else to do. So I watched this David Fincher (“Se7en”, “Fight Club”, “Panic Room”) remake of the Swedish original, and I must say, I was bitterly and aggressively disappointed. Mostly, though, I was even more bored out of my mind than I was before sitting down to watch it.

The film starts off a mixed bag. The opening titles are cool and rather Bondian, but are almost ruined by a hideous nu-metal cover of Zeppelin’s brilliant ‘Immigrant Song’. The other thing that stood out like a sore thumb pretty quickly were the wildly varying accents used by the international cast. American Rooney Mara affects a slight but uneven accent that might vaguely resemble Swedish. The film is set in Sweden, so at least Mara was trying, which is more than I can say for Daniel Craig (who I frankly don’t like at all) and Robin Wright, the former retaining his Brit accent and Wright affecting an OK Brit accent. Craig’s daughter, however, sounds awfully Swedish to me. It might be a small thing, but it’s incredibly annoying and set me off very early on in the film. Why not just cast all-Swedish actors? Oh wait, they did that...in the original.

I normally love a good mystery movie and films about Nazis, but this is dense, dull, dry, and colder than a meat locker. Those latter three things make the first even worse, because it’s hard enough keeping track of who’s who but it’s also keeping me at a distance. There’s not a lot of plot per se, but there’s so many characters, names and details that it seems really dense and bare bones all at the same time. You can criticise me for not being smart enough to follow the film, fair enough (I’m pretty much of an idiot). But it failed to give me any incentive to care to even really try, it’s seriously tedious stuff. The character played by Oscar-nominated Rooney Mara, in an overrated and uninteresting performance is a big problem. Her character is thoroughly unappealing- skanky, androgynous for the sake of being different (in a cinematic sense, not that the character herself is trying to be different), and to be honest the film should’ve been called The Girl With Venereal Disease. What bothers me is how put-on it is and how overdone it is. Did lead actress Mara earn an Oscar nomination for wearing various body and facial piercings? Because that’s all I could get out of her monotone performance. The character nor the performance seemed real to me. I haven’t seen the original, but I’ve seen what Noomi Rapace looks like in it, and Mara has gone way too far into making herself look androgynous and physically unappealing (tattoos and piercings are perfectly fine, but Mara has gone way overboard with them) to the point where she doesn’t even resemble a real human being. I don’t understand why female action heroes have to lose their femininity as well. I think that’s what I reacted against. Not because I’m sexist or whatever, I just don’t understand why a woman can’t be beautiful in a traditionally feminine way and be tough. I would think it would be saying something worse about a woman that she had to act and look like a bloke in order to be taken seriously as a ‘tough chick’. Angelina Jolie seems to get the balance right (despite not being much of an actress), but most others like Mara go the borderline shemale route. That’s perfectly fine if the character was meant to be a hermaphrodite, perhaps. But that’s not the case (David Fincher seems to disagree, dismissing another well-known actress, Scarlett Johansson as being ‘too sexy’- WHAT?), and even so, Mara’s overall performance simply didn’t interest me in any way (Natalie Portman was among many considered and would’ve gotten the balance a lot closer than Mara has if you ask me). It actually distances me from the character, not draws me in. Perhaps that’s a failing on my part, but nonetheless I was repelled. I understood why she was the way she was, I simply think in this film, it was way overdone.

The way her character is used in the film is truly perplexing to me. Despite being the title character, the film spends most of its time concerned with Daniel Craig (in the same seriously dull performance he gives in everything) and the mystery he’s solving. Mara is merely hired help, a computer hacker, and the film takes way too long to bring these two story strands together (Apparently even longer than in the Swedish version). The scenes we do get with Mara before this are completely unappealing, and even once the two strands do come together, I felt that Mara’s title character was actually pretty unnecessary. So while I found it odd that “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” was a supporting character in her own film, I also got seriously impatient with the scenes that were concerned with her because they were unpleasant and irrelevant. Did we really need to see her character get anally raped? Why was that important to the case Craig was working on? It wasn’t (I’ve heard it plays a part in later stories, but I’m reviewing this one, and it seemed unnecessary to me here. Did it have to be anal rape? Really? No, it didn’t. Fincher just wanted to be ‘cool’. Yes, cool in a rape scene. Pretty objectionable, really). If she were the main character, then perhaps this wouldn’t be an issue, but she wasn’t and it was. This aspect definitely could’ve and should’ve been removed. It annoyed me because there might’ve actually been a decent mystery in all of this, but it runs way too long, and clearly needed an editor. Screw faithfulness to the original novel (a movie isn’t a novel, the mediums are different), I’d have cut a lot of it out, starting with yes, the title character.

One of the worst things about Mara’s character in this is that a part of her character has been neutered for some reason. She is meant to be bisexual, but whilst we get two (two!) heterosexual sex scenes with her, we only get the hint of her attraction to women when a girl hops out of her bed. So we can see her get raped up the arse and have sex with Daniel Craig on two occasions, but nothing from the Isle of Lesbos? This film has a very weird view of sex, in my opinion (An opinion that probably sounds like that of a pervert myself. I swear I’m not one, though!).

 

This is such a boring film and nothing like I expected, genre-wise, either. Aside from one brief bike chase, there’s no action like I had anticipated. The performances by old pros Christopher Plummer and Steven Berkoff for me were the only positives in this film, and sadly both are underused. It’s good to see Berkoff cast slightly against type, and Plummer is perfectly cast. He’s got a crafty, malevolent twinkle in his eye that makes you distrust him in every role, and here it means you’re constantly wondering if even he can be trusted (He’s a fine substitute for Max von Sydow, who had to turn the role down, apparently). One actor, unnamed here, however, is far too obviously cast. As soon as they turn up, you know they’re one of the major villains (They also play Enya songs, possibly the worst form of torture imaginable). They even deliver the following line; ‘Y’know we’re not that different, you and I’. I shit you not.

 

Other than a couple of good supporting performances, I got no entertainment value from this film whatsoever. Seemingly pointless, it’s easily David Fincher’s worst film to date (after giving us one of 2010’s best, “The Social Network”) and glacially paced. Is there really going to be two more of these? Dear God, why?

Oh, and a question for cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth (“Blade Runner”, “Fight Club”, “The Social Network”): If the lamps in a room have white (or at least yellow) lights, then why are the rooms glowing green? I’ll keep harping on about it until I get a legit answer. Although I’m underwhelmed by Fincher’s recent fascination with pea-green cinematography (See “Zodiac”- really, see it. It’s good!), I will say this, at least it’s not murky or terribly ugly. Just incompetently thought out.

I was never going to love this film, there’s just too many things here that go against what I tend to enjoy, but even so I’m shocked at how many Oscar nominations it received. I found it completely unappealing in just about every way. The script by Steven Zallian (“Awakenings”, “Schindler’s List”, “American Gangster”) claims to be based on the original novel by Stieg Larsson, rather than the Swedish film adaptation. Whatever its origins, I just didn’t like this film at all.

Rating: D+