Merely sufficient

Rating: 6/10 (23 December 2011)

Plain and simple, without Lisbeth Salander, the book would be on the bottom shelf next to the $.99 value bin at Wal-Mart. The writing is sloppy, sensationalist and the story largely predictable, on top of that at least 200 pages of fluff. Even Lisbeth Salander, an abused hacker, bike riding, 88 pound ass-kicking badass is the product of massive lonely male goth fantasy. One gets the feeling Larsson stole the heroine from Peter Høeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow and then punked her out. Agatha Christie has at least a dozen books better than these.
So having read all the books years ago, the story itself really never did anything for me. It's really all about Salander. Fincher did a competent if procedural job. The main complaint here is he rushes through the flat pages of dialog with no pause or rhythm at all. Many scenes involve the actors simply going through motions reciting their memorized lines with few touches of humanity.
Neither movie is more than a cheap Saturday scare and to sum it up, put the cast from the Swedish film in one directed by Fincher and you've got the real deal. The most telling contrast in both movies that show where they stand is in the scene where Salander and Blomkvist are lying in bed toward the end and the writer muses to his ass kicking hacker about what she has been through. In one movie, the scene is quiet and human and the other movie, it's simply filler to the next scene. I fault Steve Zaillian's simplistic screenplay more than anything else. The Swedish one wisely compresses and simplifies many of the novels blatant flaws, while the Gringo version keeps all the boring warts.
Rooney Mara does a good, if robotic job playing Larsen's motorcycle driving Goth, hacker, sex pot, but I kept looking for the one and only Noomi Rapace at every turn. Hard act to follow. Either in writing or how she was directed, Mara's Salander plays more of a young girl in love with older man, than the distant cautious (and damaged) Salander of Rapace - which is rightly or wrongly, more in line with the book and frankly more realistic. i'm not taking anything away from Rooney Mara's work, she was brave and really good. I just prefer Noomi Rapace's interpretation.
Also WTF? with the James Bond intro? Wrong movie Fincher...Is Daniel Craigvrequiring this in his contracts now?