Pretentious, Misogynist, Christophobic, Torture Porn

Rating: 1/10 (23 December 2011)

"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" is a series of scenes of sadomasochistic torture. The most graphic scene depicts a large adult male violating a female who has the body of a pubescent girl. There are other, less graphic scenes where males are subject to sadomasochistic torture. There is a series of still photographs of women who have been subjected to sadomasochistic torture. Audience members who are attracted to that activity, or fantasies of it, will very much want to see this film. They will be rewarded by it. The film will inspire some to pursue the opportunity to violate women and girls. The filmmakers will profit from others' pain.
A flimsy, utterly vanilla murder plot – a plot out of a C-grade episode of "Columbo" – is the excuse for the exploitation scenes. A girl named Harriet disappeared forty years ago from a rich family's private island in Sweden. If you're at all curious as to what happened to Harriet, do yourself a favor and perform a google search of the film's title plus the word "spoiler." You'll soon discover how vapid the plot is.
The biggest mystery of the film is why all these people ostensibly living in Sweden speak English with variations on Scandinavian accents, accents that roll around unevenly between Helsinki and Vienna. Robin Wright's accent is best. Christopher Plummer's is worst. Daniel Craig doesn't even try (memories of his uneven Polish accent in "Defiance.")
Harriet is being pursued by Daniel Craig, a reporter, and Lisbeth, the eponymous heroine. Lisbeth is strictly a male fantasy who could never exist in real life. She is less real than the blow-up doll Ryan Gosling fell in love with in "Lars and the Real Girl." Lisbeth has superhero powers on a computer, with weapons, on a motorcycle, and in international finance, but she is helpless when men attempt to assault her. Make the woman powerful and then violate and humiliate her: a classic motif of misogynist porn. Lisbeth has the body of a pubescent girl, and you get to see every inch of it. For the gentlemen's club crowd, Lisbeth does girl-on-girl action, but, in the end, her job is to make the male lead, and viewer, happy.
As part of the film's pretentious overlay, there are lots of interior shots of Swedish furniture and exterior shots of snow. Chair. Snow. Wind. Torture. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
The film is boring. The attempts to create tension are pathetic and hackneyed. A character is alone in an archive at night. Suddenly a door is heard closing. OOOO boogedy boogedy! I'm really scared now! Evidence is pieced together and suddenly one realizes who the antagonist is. And the antagonist is creeping up upon the hero even at that very moment! Be still my heart. A killer talks for a really long time before dispatching the victim, thus potentially giving a rescuer a chance to arrive. Wow, I've never seen THAT done before!
There is a completely pointless series of scenes tacked on at the end relating to high finance. So much for narrative tension and drive. Trent Reznor's score is endlessly irritating in its neediness: "Listen to me! Listen to me! Listen to me! I'm doing something really edgy here!" I kept thinking of Bernard Herrmann's amazing shower scene music from "Psycho," music that seemed to just be the natural sound that scene would make, music that was a seamless part of the terror. No such moments in "Tattoo."
What else. Rich people are bad. Nazis are really, really bad. Rich Nazis are really, really, really bad. Fat people are worst of all. The Bible causes people to become serial killers who hate women. Interestingly, boring, pretentious torture porn, apparently, does not cause people to become serial killers who hate women. Every other Swedish home has an extensively equipped torture chamber – you missed that at IKEA, didn't you? Well, the stores ARE really big. Torture is such a popular national pastime in Sweden that you have to wonder how they make time to prepare their famous meatballs, never mind Volvos. Tourists traveling to Sweden must learn to say, "Don't tase me, Bro," in Swedish, and should never, ever drop the soap.