Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Move over, Noomi Rapace -- there's a new Lisbeth Salander in town. And she's as kick-ass as ever.

The relatively unknown Rooney Mara has pulled off an unlikely cinematic coup, claiming Rapace's iconic role as her own. As the tough, taut and tortured Salander, Mara all but owns the new English-language version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with her brave and stunning performance. If there is any justice in the movie world, she has hacked, pummeled and snarled her way to an Oscar nomination.

For the rare film fan who hasn't read Stieg Larsson's bestselling Millennium trilogy of crime novels, seen the trilogy of Swedish (but energetic, and therefore not very Swedish) films, or otherwise been exposed to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's plot and characters, I'll summarize the movie as best I can without spoilers. (This isn't easy for such a dense, complicated story with plenty of surprises.)

The story opens as grizzled Swedish journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) has lost a libel lawsuit over allegations he made against billionaire industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström. Soon thereafter, fellow industrialist Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), patriarch of a wealthy Swedish family, hires Blomkvist ostensibly to write the Vanger family history, but actually to solve a decades-old mystery: Vanger's great-niece Harriet (Moa Garpendal) disappeared from the family's remote island home more nearly 40 years earlier, and Vanger suspects a family member murdered her. As payment, Vanger promises Blomkvist a substantial salary and evidence against Wennerström that will exonerate Blomkvist.

Before hiring Blomkvist, Vanger had hired Lisbeth Salander to check into the journalist's background. The heavily pierced, tattooed and punked-out Salander is a brilliant but damaged computer hacker, researcher and surveillance agent, a technological whiz with a horrific past. She was declared legally incompetent as a child and remains a ward of the state, fully capable of fending for herself (actually, more capable than most people) but saddled with being under the care of a legal guardian.

When Blomkvist discovers Salander has been surveilling him, he persuades her to join him in solving the mystery of Harriet's disappearance. The two form a highly unlikely team -- a haggard, divorced, middle-aged man and an asocial, caffeine and nicotine-fueled rebel not much older than his daughter. But they grow closer as they find themselves involved in mysteries and conspiracies far larger than one teenage girl's disappearance.

And that's all I can say about the story, for the twists and often shocking turns begin not long after The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's intriguing, James Bondish opening credits. The film is less a remake of its Swedish counterpart than a new adaptation of Larsson's novel, an astute and riveting reimagining of the story that loses nothing in the translation to English. (It could have lost 20 minutes of running time, but this is my only major quibble. A very talky action film, it is.)

I haven't read the novel, but the buzz is that the new movie hews more closely to Larsson's story than does the Swedish film, capturing more of the novel's brutality, wincing humor and dark view of the human condition. I can't say if this is true, but I can say that director David Fincher's take on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is every bit as good as its predecessor, and probably the slickest, ballsiest and best thriller I've seen this year.

Again, much of the credit goes to Mara, whose performance no doubt will catapult her to well deserved stardom. Comparisons to Rapace are inevitable, but Mara's take on Salander isn't mimicry; she brings her own achingly troubled nuances to the role, along with an often humorous impatience with the less technically savvy Blomkvist. In Mara's hands, Salander is eternally vulnerable but unfailingly shrewd. She's even romantic, at least when she isn't giving the bad guys a well deserved ass-kicking. (Is she sexy? I'll leave that to the eye of the beholder.)

If Mara owns The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it's not for lack of other great performances. Craig is unusually unglamorous as Blomkvist, shedding his pretty boy image and looking 10 years older than he has in other films. Baggy-eyed and rumpled, he seems less than thrilled to be in the midst of the Vangers' web of intrigue; his weary grumpiness is a great counterpoint to Salander's feisty surliness. Craig perfectly captures the essence of Blomkvist, a dedicated journalist who saunters through the film as if he'd much rather be raking political muck than digging into a family's decades-long dysfunction.

Plummer is also convincing as the patriarchal Vanger, but isn't he always convincing? In a role originally meant for Max von Sydow -- a genuine Swede -- Plummer is genteel and stately, a picture of Scandinavian stoicism in the face of his family's checkered past. Stellan Skarsgård is also terrific as Harriet's brother Martin, a genial man with a vaguely disquieting air about him.

Absorbing and brutal (skip it if you're squeamish about blood or graphic sexual violence), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a finely polished addition to Stieg Larsson's legacy. It will find a loyal audience among fans of the novel and original film, and deservedly so.