The Girl with the Drag­on Tattoo

Great films have been made from much less than Stieg Larsson’s posthu­mous­ly pub­lished nov­el. But with all the fan­fare sur­round­ing his Mil­len­ni­um Tril­o­gy over the last few years, not to men­tion the high pro­file of the pop­u­lar Swedish-lan­guage adap­ta­tions, it’s hard to get too excit­ed about this oppor­tune Hol­ly­wood retake.

But wait, David Fincher’s direct­ing. It’s scored by Trent Reznor and Atti­cus Ross (The Social Net­work), script­ed by Steven Zail­lian (Mon­ey­ball) and lensed by Jeff Cro­nen­weth (Fight Club). That means hyper-kinet­ic kicks lay­ered with neo-noir hues and a thump­ing elec­tron­ic pulse, right? Well, yes, but it’s just pol­ish. High-grade atten­tion-grab­bing gloss slathered lib­er­al­ly onto Larsson’s crude pseu­do-fem­i­nist turd.

Rooney Mara is the epony­mous ink-brand­ed hero­ine with a trou­bled past who abets Daniel Craig’s dis­graced journo Mikael Blomkvist in a miss­ing per­sons case in rur­al Swe­den (Finch­er shrewd­ly retains the orig­i­nal set­ting). With his inves­tiga­tive nous and her mad cyber-hack­ing skills, it’s not long before the pair starts to unrav­el the sin­is­ter mys­tery that’s haunt­ed the afflu­ent Vanger clan for almost 40 years.

Mara’s meta­mor­pho­sis from mousey girl-next-door to nip­ple-pierced punk pin-up is remark­able; Fincher’s pun­ish­ing audi­tion­ing process prov­ing fruit­ful. Yet under­neath all the chain-smok­ing, motor­cy­cle-shred­ding minx­ery is an actress who exudes a porce­lain virtue.

That’s not to say Mara doesn’t give a ball­sy, cred­i­ble per­for­mance; it’s more that her Lis­beth Salan­der is inher­ent­ly vul­ner­a­ble when mea­sured against Noo­mi Rapace’s androg­y­nous meta-siren.

As such, Mara’s Salan­der can be read as a naked endorse­ment of the source novel’s voyeuris­tic and misog­y­nis­tic sub­text. While any under­cur­rent of sex­u­al grat­i­fi­ca­tion derived from the objec­ti­fi­ca­tion and tor­ture of women is like­ly to remain a grey area, one thing is crys­tal: this frosty tale of mur­der, scan­dal and sub-Jonathan Creek twists, cou­pled with the news that Mar­tin Scors­ese is set to take on Jo Nesbø’s ​‘The Snow­man’, sug­gests that the Scan­di pot­boil­er boom is only just get­ting started.