Rapace has injected herself as a major star!

Rating: 8/10 (15 May 2011)

I remember the days when I used to date a few girls with dragon tattoos. It marked me as a guy that liked Gothic chicks, or something like that. I thought that was unfair stereotypical criticism not only to me but for the young ladies. OK, this never happened (well, maybe a couple of times it did). I was just trying to be a guy with a "girl with a dragon tattoo" story, but obviously that intro did not make its mark. Anyways, most have heard of this foreign flick adapted from the late Stieg Larsson's best-selling novel about Mikael Blomkvist, a Stockholm disgraced reporter who is employed by Henrik Vanger, a geriatric Swedish millionaire in order to unravel the mystery of who killed Vanger's beloved niece Harriet. Vanger offers Blomkvist a wealthy fee for his services, the only catch is that the murder occurred 40 years ago and it is not fresh blood anymore (ouch, I hit below the belt on that one, must have been the dragon inside of me), and another catch is that Henrik requests for Mikael to investigate some of the family members of his own Vanger clan. I guess Henrik is of the "school of thinking" that a family who is rich together also kills together. However, where this movie gets profoundly skin deep is in the character of Lisbeth Salander, a gothicetta computer hacker who has been able to hack away on Blomkvist's CPU for sometime and eventually ends up teaming with Mikael to investigate the Vanger cold case. Salander is witty, crafty, sexy, sly, sharp, and also has one big ass tattoo on her back. I thought that Director Niels Arden Opley's film adaptation of Larsson's masterpiece literary offering was more than OK but not perfect, but then again Opley could just do so much in incorporating all the intrinsic details from the book to the movie. Screenwriters Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg probably knew that they were playing with fire in adapting a Larsson book to a movie screenplay, but they actually excelled with a well-knitted movie scribe. I must report that there was no libel in Michael Nyqvist's suave performance as Blomkvist, but it was Noomi Rapace's multi-layered thespian effort in her Lisbeth portrayal what fired me up the most about "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". Noomi is looming as a major actress! I have yet to see the film's sequels "The Girl Who Played With Fire" (not based on all the girls who have dated me) or "The Girls Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest" (not based on all the girls who have kicked me where it hurts the most), but I doubt those films can reach the achievement of its praise-worthy predecessor. **** Good