The Tedious Film with the Pierced Gen-X Girl

Rating: 5/10 (10 January 2012)

Yikes. What was all the hype about with this film? First off, it felt so dated - maybe in 1985-1995 this would've seemed relevant. And s - l - o - w. If you're a film buff, you find yourself going - Ah, this feels like the original Wicker Man (isolated island ...is it going to be a pagan cult murder pact?), and that feels like The Ghost Writer (isolated enclave, rich people, modernist architecture), The Vanishing (creepy northern European sadist), a sprinkle of Hostel (control and intent to torture and murder), with the gimmick of a pierced, tattooed Gen-Xer waif girl as a co-protagonist.
The story unfolds along parallel streams and it's nearly halfway through the film that our male writer protagonist finally partners with Pierced Girl. Nothing is terribly interesting or new - you have seen it all before. Bits and pieces were put together from other films for this film. There is no actual suspense at any point in the film, and while visually pretty, it is nothing groundbreaking. Fincher, the director, went with this washed-out blue-grey color palette for his visual undertone and it is bleak but lends nothing. Gratuitous nudity and sex pop up again and again and never once is it necessary to propel the story.
The girl is supposed to be near-feral and it just doesn't wash. How would such a street-smart hacker chick who is so clever she gets hired by a powerful law firm to do background checks get herself in a vulnerable position with a sex-hungry fat slob of a social case-worker who controls her money? If her intent all along was to appear vulnerable so she could gain the upper hand and extort this guy it didn't sell - the movie played as if she was compromised somehow. And a tough, feral chick like that hasn't already done anal sex? The shots of her walking painfully after the anal rape and in the shower bleeding and defecating from her anus were real emblems of how far filmmaking has fallen.
Oh, and we get a cute kitty cat chopped up into pieces which connects to ... nothing. The "mystery" of who's in the pictures and who took the pictures and so on is completely without tension or suspense or interest - we yawn as the process unfolds without any profound reveals.
The kicker for just how stupid this film is when Pierced Girl suddenly morphs into super-spy and drains the awful subplot billionaire character's money from his accounts. She had those skills yet needed to suck up (literally) to her coercive social worker for paltry checks? And the real clang of just how dumb this story and movie is during the final scene when she gets all sad because hero writer man has a girlfriend already and so she tosses the fancy leather jacket she bought him and sweet card into the garbage. Is this not the same girl who "knows -him- better than his closest friend do?" because her back-grounding on him was so thorough?
Save yourself a kick in the head and avoid this bad film and instead watch the original of The Wicker Man, The Vanishing, and The Ghost Writer and see what Girl With the Dragon Tattoo tried to do.