newjerseynewsroom.com

BY MIRIAM RINN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” franchise is the gift that keeps on giving. Three novels by Steig Larsson so far, with the hope of a fourth if they can settle the legal wrangling; three Swedish-made movies, among the most popular ever shown in Europe; and now a two-and-a-half hour English-language film by Hollywood A-list director David Fincher. All on behalf of a skinny tattooed computer hacker with a very bad attitude.

As played by Rooney Mara, Lisbet is physically reckless but emotionally fragile. Heavily tattooed and wearing oversized men’s clothes, the tiny girl doesn’t think twice about attacking three guys who steal her laptop bag in a sleekly choreographed chase on a subway escalator, but she seems momentarily nonplussed by her sexually harassing government guardian. Unlike Noomi Rapace, who played Lisbet in the Swedish movies as a fierce bird of prey, Mara retains at least a bit of childlike innocence. That makes her character more sympathetic, but somewhat less credible. She doesn’t seem hard enough to do all the damage she does.

Lisbet works off the books as a high-tech snoop for a Swedish security company, and she’s assigned to burrow into the background of Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), an investigative journalist who has just lost a libel case brought against him and his magazine by a powerful industrialist. Lisbet is working on behalf of another extraordinarily wealthy man, Henrik Vanger, played by the always wonderful Christopher Plummer. He wants to hire Mikael to look into the disappearance of his beloved niece Harriet. The girl vanished 40 years earlier, and though her body was never found, Vanger is convinced that she was murdered, and suspects that a member of his extended family is responsible. He has his reasons; the family is a deeply distasteful bunch that includes Nazis, alcoholics, and general creeps. Almost broke and tired of the trial publicity, Mikael accepts Vanger’s offer and goes to stay in an isolated guest house on an island in the north of the country to begin his research.