A bad movie with subtitles is still a bad movie.

Rating: 3/10 (11 January 2011)

Dear movie critics, stop overpraising foreign language films, they are not automatically better than films in English. Anyway, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is actually the tale of a professional hacker that is very goth and very anti-conformist, that meets a crusading investigative journalist that has just been wrongly sentenced to prison for libel. Before heading off to the big house the reporter agrees to investigate the 40 year old disappearance of a young girl for a very wealthy man with not long to live. The reporter investigates the case for a time before the dragon tattooed girl hacks into his system and uncovers a lead for him, ultimately leading to both romantic and professional partnerships.
The movie spends an inordinate amount of time establishing the hardships faced by the dragon tattooed girl : her step father was a drunk that abused her mom, she set him on fire, got sent away, is under legal supervision, can't control her own finances, is raped by her legal guardian, is attacked by roving street gangs, gets revenge on her guardian by filming his rape of her and then raping him with a dildo and tattooing "I am a sadist pig and a rapist" on his chest. The anti-social goth girl with issues is not real difficult to get across so the mountain of character establishment was really unnecessary. With a running time of 2 1/2 hours some trimming up would have been appreciated.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo seemed more like a dark, high production value Lifetime movie than an international film sensation. I guess I'm not cultured enough to fully appreciate the garbage coming out of Europe.