The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

It's one of the most engaging foreign films to come along since 'Tell No One' in 2008.

A chilling detective tale, a horrific sexual abuse drama and an overlong, emotional, tie-up-every-loose-end melodrama that is sure to be half an hour shorter when Hollywood remakes it without the Swedish dialogue and probably without the cool Swedish edge.

I finished Larsson's novel with the uncomfortable sense it used a good mystery as an excuse to dwell on sadism and perversity -- an aspect only exacerbated on screen.

A chilling film best experienced bundled up in a sweater and scarf.

It's the rare 2 1/2 -hour film that doesn't make you look at your watch once. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is such a film.

The result is a character-driven mystery of considerable emotional power, often harrowing and always compelling.

The cluttered narrative leaves little room for character development, though director Niels Arden Oplev does manage to accommodate plenty of gratuitous torture and rape.

The Swedish film, based off of the late Steig Larsson's first book in his Millennium series, is a wonderful beginning to a trilogy of cinema. It is easily seen as a successful task of turning a work of literature into film. It has done Larsson's books a great justice! It is dark, curious, brooding, violent, and thrilling. The settings of the film's scenes were unimaginably dead-on from the book. The character casting and cinematography are astonishing. The financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist, played by Michael Nyqvist, is a mix of wit, steadfastness, and even a edge of humor. He is intelligent, and pairs well with the bright and dynamic Lisbeth. Lisbeth Salander, played by Noomi Rapace, was casted wonderfully if not perfectly. Her edge, look, and body language really brought life to the character of Lisbeth. Lisbeth's past has set her present and maybe even future in the unsteady hands of the corrupt. The two stories of Blomkvist and Salander stand aside, overlap, intertwine, and come together in a wonderful pace. A 40-year old crime is dropped in the lap of Blomkvist to decipher once and for all contending with his own battles in the eyes of politics and financial journalism. Salander, the reserved technology-driven hacker, whom is assigned cases by a security company, is researching Blomkvist. Her life, ruled by her hard past and difficult present, draws you in and doesn't let you go. The two characters come to work together and take on a heavy journey of murders, misogyny, mental illness, revenge, and corruption.

Better than the American version with more believable characters but still fairly unappealing.

It doesn't take long for Girl With The Dragon Tattoo to tip its hand. Inside of five minutes we're presented with a television reporter doing a typical live shot from outside a courthouse. Well, typical in every way except that she's prominently, ostentatiously pregnant. Ah. Female power. Gotcha. In the ensuing two hours we learn that women are lesbians because they were **** as children. That women are smarter and stronger than men. That victims are allowed to be warped by their past but that criminals are not. And that it's quite OK for a female to play the traditional male role and for the male to more or less play the traditional female role. That last one is especially OK because the female in question happens to be the very best thing about this movie. Her name's Noomi Rapace and she plays a pierced, tattooed punkish girl with a very violent streak who also happens to be a whiz at the internet thingie and has a crackerjack memory. I'd like to say she's complicated but that's being a bit generous to the writer, Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson. But she is interesting in a malevolent, **** kind of way. Rapace becomes entangled in the life of an investigative journalist who's hired to solve a 40 year-old case of a missing girl. And if Rapace is the best thing about this movie, then the impact she has on his life, thin gruel though it may be, is the second best. Third best is the actual plot of the movie, a somewhat complicated whodunnit replete with sex, sadism and, of course, murder. Salacious stuff somehow rendered limp, save for a handful of electric scenes with Rapace and her probation officer. I understand that Larsson wrote three novels based on these characters, popped them off to his publisher, then dropped dead. He never saw them become an international success. I also understand that this Swedish movie (with subtitles) is the first of three films to be based on his books. In the next film I look forward to seeing how Rapace's character develops and grows. She's really quite interesting. And I hold out hope that the girl power message is supported by stronger story and is energized by a director with a more skillful grasp of pacing and tension.

I haven't read the book so I can't tell if that was also such not thrilling. You've got a foreboding but there comes a ending that absolutely doesn't live up to expectations. Seems like Niels Arden Oplev was very unmotivated to make this movie. Noomi Rapace shows what a great actress she is, but the minor actors were hardly ignored in the film. You don't know how the both main actors feel, which may be a clever trick to get you to watch the two sequels. But TGWTDT is a disappointing criminal film with a lame story.

A movie so sick, so boring and so meaning less it will make your head hurt. The girl with the Dragon Tattoo is one of the worst piles of trash I have ever seen. A movie you don't want to see or remember for the rest of your life.