The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Book 2 (Millennium Trilogy)
For the closing volume of the graphic-novel adaptation of the first book in Larsson’s blockbuster trilogy, our critique is much the same as the opener. Mina does an admirable job of distilling Larsson’s wordy prose, and the art is bold and effective. Series fans who still can’t get enough of the story line may enjoy scrutinizing this to see which small liberties Mina has taken (a little more banter between Blomkvist and his lovers, for example). But it’s an uneven interpretation of Larsson’s alleged feminist bent: full-page entries with statistics about sexual violence lose some of their impact when followed by gratuitous frames of Salander in her underwear. In the novels, Salander is a genuinely fascinating character, and the books would never have been so big without her. Both Noomi Rapace and Rooney Mara conveyed her damaged psyche hauntingly onscreen. Here, with her interior voice quieted, she’s little more than a punky, bisexual computer hacker who looks cool on a motorcycle. And if teenage boys are fantasizing about her, then it’s mission unaccomplished. --Keir Graff