In Swedish, the film is known as Men Who Hate Women. In English, the title refers to the work’s unconventional female protagonist. In reality, though, it is just a predictable bore peppered with some surprisingly nasty moments. Indeed, as with the conspiracy genre that was bemoaned here some weeks ago, it has become very hard to find good and original detective dramas anymore. Such works have always been heavily character-driven. However, a skinny Goth who combines a photographic memory with deep-rooted mental traumas and who has become obsessed with a paunchy middle-aged journalist is either someone’s private fantasy come to life or a test of where the boundary now lies between plausibility and parody. In any event, is there not already an American police show that features a very bright Goth who sleeps in a coffin?
Anyway, the weird and the wacky aside, this adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s novel of the same name is based around two central plotlines. The first is the privately commissioned investigation by journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) into the mysterious disappearance of the niece of a wealthy industrialist (Sven-Bertil Taube) forty years previously. The second is that Blomkvist has become the subject of some obsessive cyber-snooping by our aforementioned skinny Goth, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace). Sullen and misanthropic, she appears to have more piercings than personality. On the one hand, this makes her decidedly vulnerable to various malevolent characters that pop up. On the other hand, she does make for an intriguing, albeit unlikely, guardian angel for Blomkvist.
However, what starts out as a dark, brooding, and multi-stranded tale from director Niels Arden Oplev soon turns into a much more straightforward sleuths-following-clues drama with enough bangs and wallops along the way to make sure that no one has entirely dozed off in the audience. The mystery itself concentrates on a secretive and feud-ridden family who have nothing to do with their time except be rich and nasty. Moreover, the case is so cold by the time that Blomkvist picks it up, and the related characters so under-developed, that frankly you are more likely to be interested in which of them flosses at night than in which of them did what dastardly deed to the other and when.
Worse, this is seemingly the first in a trilogy of such films. As such, it probably explains why there were so many loose ends and orphaned references in the script. On the other hand, a less generous opinion of the film would be that it has simply been disappointingly scripted and edited. Moreover, there is something terribly superficial about both of the central characters. Therefore, whilst the wonderfully-transformed Ms. Rapace is agreeably volatile in her depiction of her moody character and Mr. Nyqvist plays the dull but amiable Blomkvist in a credible enough manner, the thought of sitting through any more of their adventures together is enough to make spending a bitter Swedish winter alone in an isolated and draughty cabin seem like the far more enthralling prospect.
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