Movie Review: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

3.5 stars out of 5

Spoiler alert: It’s a temporary tattoo.

OK, I hadn’t read the books, nor seen the original movies. But the trailer looked good, and David Fincher directed, and oh man do I love me some David Fincher. (The Social Network was my favorite movie of 2010, Fight Club one of my all-time faves, and hey don’t forget Zodiac.) And for quite a while this felt like another one of his best. But then it didn’t anymore.

What happened? We start out with some pretty standard mystery/police-drama devices. The discredited protagonist. The doesn’t-play-by-the-rules investigator. A room full of people in which one is likely… a murderer! And yet for almost two hours it doesn’t feel like a genre flick, for many reasons. The titular Girl is a terrific character, with Rooney Mara showing she’s a far superior actress than her American Horror Story sister. Daniel Craig is subdued and very un-Bond-like. The snowy, bleak, shades-of-grey Swedish setting adds to the feeling of tension that begins in the opening seconds and doesn’t let up. The only things that bothered me in the early going were a way-too-convenient plot-development visit from Craig’s character’s daughter, and what seemed like (though wasn’t confirmed in the credits) product placement from Apple and Epson. This from the man who mocked IKEA culture so effectively in Fight Club. (Actually, IKEA is name-checked here, appropriate for Sweden.) But still, the movie chugged along, clues being gathered, with sprinkles of Nazism and a healthy serving of sadism.

And then… I don’t know. I suppose i have to blame the late Stieg Larsson. In a movie that had avoided stupidity, what feels like a climactic scene is tremendously stupid. Ironically enough, very Bond-like. But it’s not the end! Like the Energizer bunny, the movie just keeps going, and going. And like The Dark Knight, the last half-hour-plus felt extraneous, like another movie. Salieri thought Mozart used too many notes. To the no-longer-alive Mr. Larsson, i say: Too much plot!

Much like Spielberg in War Horse (man, I am doing a lot of referring-elsewhere in this review!), Fincher doesn’t give up after the stupid moment. He is stylish, and had a good ending to work with. But too much of the film’s later section felt like the genre exercise that it had avoided being early on. Enjoyable, but maybe my least favorite Fincher? (Honestly can’t recall how I felt about Panic Room, though now I see that a young Kristen Stewart was in it. Huh!)