The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Man som hatar kvinnor)

The Swedish thriller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, based on the first novel in Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, strives to capture the serial killer grime-chic of Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs, with a twist. It’s contextualized through a culture operating on a hush-hush debasement of women. The movie is unfortunately only serious to its ends of shock titillation. Filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev carelessly pitches heroine Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace) revenge-raping her parole officer with a dildo as a moment of empowerment and sado-masochistic fantasy. Rapace has charisma as the socially abused and isolated computer hacker investigating the case of a missing woman. She’s also far too stunning a goth/punk model for the story’s sociological potential. Running a tension-preventative 2.5 hours, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is so bent on cheap kicks (throw in some stuff about Nazis as well), it never stares into the darkness it proposes. –Mark Palermo