Review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) by Allen G — 04 Apr 2013

Predictable from start to finish with the only surprises coming from sexual violence that has no development leading up to the events and has under lying themes that you could find covered better in any average 90s murder thriller. The performances are good and it is a fine example of dark tone but this isn't enough to save this from it's unrealistic yet predictable plot twists that would be laughable in films with less execution and finesse than this one.

I really don't see what's supposed to be special about this- there isn't a single element that you can't find in other films in the genre and there's nothing in the script that's memorable whatsoever. All of this would be fine if there was something to the story but nope-.

*disclaimer- the following paragraph mocks some elements of the film and thus is full of "spoilers"*.

We are told the bad guys are in the family- then we are told there are Nazis in the family= it's them. Duh. We are told her body hasn't been found and that she had plenty of good reasons for leaving= She left. Duh. The book contains names and numbers and we are told that she was deeply religious= sections of the bible. Duh.

SPOILERS FINISHED.

Those are just some examples but virtually everything that happened in this film was easy to figure out. The violent stuff seemed fairly pointless to me- so much time is spent on showing Lisbeth's troubles that no time is spent on showing her- there's no character development in the script itself and the strong performance only does so much. Not to mention that the stuff with her legal guardian is entirely irrelevant to the main storyline- there's similar ideas in there but none of them are touched on in the film, I assume the book does that and the film removed it, only keeping that part of the story intact for shock value.

The Blomkvist character seemed to have been represented better here and was a strong point to the film but with underdeveloped characters everywhere else and cheap plotlines to change our attitudes on characters without having the script do any real work, I'm left cheated in the end.

It's a fine watch and it's certainly not boring but it's nothing special either, in fact, had I known it would be like this, I wouldn't have watched it.