Why the dragon tattoo?

Rating: 6/10 (20 May 2012)

Watching "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" felt the same as watching an average Criminal Minds episode (not the good ones).
The plot is about a crime investigation, where a journalist and a computer hacker team up to find the murderer of a rich man's teenage niece a few decades ago.
The plot is filled with a series of useless subplots whose only purpose seem to be:
a) Justify the later behavior of the female lead (yes, she can let a guy burn in flames as we already saw what she did with her parole officer)
b) Give screen time to actors whose characters play no relevant role in the story
c) Explain (in very long 30 minutes) that the journalist is facing false accusations and is a honest man, thus the perfect guy for the job - who conveniently happens to have been babysitted by the missing girl during his childhood at the rich man's house.
The pace is so slow with two parallel story lines that come together only in the last half of the movie, and someone could die of boredom before the duo solves the mystery.
The cinematography is beautiful, but there is no sense of isolation, which is expected from a movie set on a island that is connected to the mainland by a single bridge - oh sure, the reason for setting the story on an island is to make possible the photo evidence on which the whole investigation is based on.
All in all, the plot does not connect well and is just another one of those hyped movies which fail to deliver what they promise. Maybe if a better work has been done the editing room, there would be less pointless subplots and we would have a more consistent film.