Fincher Style to Spare, But Terrible Material

Rating: 7/10 (20 January 2012)

I've not read the book on which David Fincher's newest movie is based, and after seeing the adaptation I certainly don't want to. For it's obvious, even to someone who hasn't read it, that Fincher and company are fighting an up-hill battle against borderline terrible material.
That material is all about perversion, sadism, torture, murder, and it's particularly occupied with all of the horrible ways in which men can victimize women. It's the kind of story in which the serial killer gets caught and then delivers a lengthy soliloquy directly to the main protagonist so that the audience can be bluntly told what the writer wasn't creative enough to tell us in any other way and another character can swoop in in the nick of time and stop the serial killer from killing our hero.
But Fincher's talents as a director are considerable, as are those of his cast, and the film is pretty entertaining up to a point. But it goes of for far too long, there are one too many story lines, and the material becomes too preposterous to bear. What the film has going for it is the performance of Rooney Mara, sensational as the titular character. Though the film treats her character like crap, Mara herself is hypnotic and carries the film, no small feat given that she by no means has the most screen time (that honor belongs to Daniel Craig, also very good). The incessant violence against women is hard to take after a point -- the story isn't smart enough to make any commentary about that violence, so it just comes to feel uncomfortably gratuitous.
One bit of unequivocal praise I can offer this film -- I doubt I will see as kick-ass an opening credits sequence in any other movie this year.
Grade: B