That awkward moment in a thriller when the film director is the murderer

Rating: 3/10 (7 March 2012)

I regret to admit I fell victim to my previous experience with this title. Unfortunately when you come to the point of evaluating something you can not simply discard expectations, attitude, emotional state and finally comparison. I am a huge fan of Daniel Craig and I was eager to see his performance, which in my opinion was... decent. Rooney Mara was OK. Unfortunately "OK" is not enough in that case.
Everything felt like different parts were stitched together with no consistency. It lacked fluidity and at some parts there were gaps in the logic of the story. I don't really know who to blame. Is it the director's fault, is it the screenplay or both, but most of the time the actors were so confused about their roles as if they were waiting for someone backstage to remind them it is their part now and they should act and speak. The movie failed at capturing this really dark, perverted and deranged atmosphere I felt while watching the Swedish adaptation. This was in parts because of the aforementioned leaps from one episode to the other and also because of the shallow character development. I was waiting to be tossed into some deep emotional and psychological aspects of Lisbeth's personality and I am still waiting long after the end credits but to no avail. Noomi Rapace's acting was so intense it was almost violating. It makes you experience whole plethora of extreme emotions and crave for more. I felt nothing like this here, no compassion or rage, no sympathies, empathy or curiosity...it was if Rooney Mara's Lisbeth was just passing by to say hello. This was no interpretation as many of the comments here claim, it was a complete rip-off. Exact same scenes, angles, but hollow and irrelevant. I don't find the "James Bond" beginning even amusing.
Reading some of the reviews most of the people pay credit to David Fincher, but in my opinion he is the main weakness of the film... obviously not in terms of the gross income it generated, but in the interpretation. It was the first thriller murdered by its own director. He managed to murder the story and the characters quite easy. The halo effect around him and the cast compensates the total inability to understand and represent certain social and cultural aspects embodied in this dark Nordic story.
Fincher is most certainly the next Uwe Boll.