Nicely adapted, but dull

Rating: 4/10 (6 February 2011)

There were some good things about Steig Larsson's bestselling thriller, 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo': it was readable, there was a well constructed socio-political backdrop, and the core plot was an cleverly constructed variant of that old chestnut, the closed room mystery, with a solid detective story to eventually unpick it. There were also some things I disliked: the story was supposedly written to highlight male violence against women, but arguably revelled in such violence itself and then "balanced" this by equally grisly elements of revenge; the author's relentless plugging of Apple Macs was tedious and devoid of novelistic purpose; the central male character appeared to be a highly flattering portrait of the author's alter ego; while the central female character, Soljander, appeared to be pretty much whatever the author wanted her to be at each moment of the story, sexy and unsexy by turn, and a miraculously brilliant computer hacker to boot. Also, the taut central plot ultimately dissolved into something much more gruesome, but also less convincing. This (Swedish) film version (the first of two, the other made by Hollywood) gets some things right, most notably through its interpretations of the leading roles. Soljander here seems more coherent and thereby interesting, than she does in the book. But the book's greatest strength, its procedural detail, is harder to follow, and the director tends to rather spell out the meaning to compensate. The greatest failing, however, is shared with the book, and it's simply that the story is wildly over-complex, Larsson had a clutch of interesting ideas but maybe lacked the confidence to trust just one; either that, or he correctly judged the public appetite for wild, over-the-top tales. I've seen worse thrillers; but I have to say, I found this one dull.