Title: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Opens: December 21, 2011

You can bet that producer Scott Rudin spent no more than two minutes thinking about the director he should hire for the American version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” The story is right up David Fincher’s alley. Fincher, whose “Seven” deals with two detective tracking down a serial killer who uses the seven deadly sins as his method of operation, and whose “Zodiac” finds a San Francisco cartoonist following the paths of the Zodiac killer, is the ideal figure at the helm of an investigation by an amateur detective into a series of killings. “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” will be a new experience by those in the English-speaking world who are allergic to movies with titles, but if you’ve seen Niels Arden Oplev’s Swedish look at unspeakable crimes, you could find the American version less involving. Why so? For one thing, the Swedish accents of the players are not consistent: Daniel Craig in the role of journalist Mikael Blomkvist starts off appropriately Scandinavian, then dissolves into his British tongue. For another, there is cognitive dissonance when the signs on the stores and the clippings in the newspapers are Swedish, yet the performers all speak English. Still another finds Rooney Mara (“The Social Contract”), though up to the role of an antisocial but highly skilled computer hacker, to be merely a fairly normal woman you might feel comfortable chatting with because she lacks the delightful freakishness of Noomi Rapace, whose piercings and wild hair style convince the audience that this is her authentic self. Rooney Mara’s idiosyncratic makeup seems put-on, something she has donned strictly for the tourists.

Despite some melodramatic flourishes, most exceptionally being the immolation of a really bad man in the kind of traffic accident we had hoped he’d have, “Dragon Tattoo” is more of a complex, intellectual exercise than a riveting, emotional drama. What’s worse is that the opening scenes that introduce those of us who had not seen the original version are so rushed that one might not be blamed for throwing in the towel rather than able to gain a hold on the themes.

Yet so much work has gone into the making of the drama–the whizz-bang computer hacking, the sharp scenes of rural Sweden in the depths of winter, the no-holds-barred violence against those who would take sexual advantage of the vulnerable, the perfect merging of music and action, that one must carry away considerable respect for Fincher’s filmmaking. The tale could find a place in Nation magazine or Huffington Post in its condemnation of practices of big business while in like manner expressing horror at the way people in power can exploit the vulnerable.

The story kicks off with a libel judgment against Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) for an article he wrote for Millennium magazine edited by his some-time lover Erika (Robin Wright), a judgment that wiped out much of his personal savings. He is therefore happy to accept an unusual job from Henrik (Christopher Plummer), the head of a rich, dysfunctional extended Vanger family, to use his journalistic skills to investigate the disappearance of Vanger’s 16-year-old niece Harriet in 1966. Locating himself in a Vanger cottage, Mikael seeks and gains the help of oddball hacker Lisbeth (Rooney Mara), who has good reason to mistrust all men, having put up with the rapes and other sexual violence of her trustee (Yorick van Wageniinger) on whom she depends for an allowance.

The film has two of the most violence scenes you’ll see this year, one that takes place in a basement decked out by a man who might have seen Eli Roth’s “Hostel 2,” another that unfolds in the trustee’s own digs. These make one wonder how another film, “Shame,” about a sex addict who demonstrates his hobby albeit without much violence, received an NC-17 rating while “Dragon Tattoo” pulled an R. While the side-role performers exude their characters’ individual differences; e.g. Stellan Skarsgard as the sociable head of the corporation, Christopher Plummer as the charming chap who hires the journalist, and Yorick van Wageningen as the dude whose appearance does little to belie his predatory nature, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” comes off as a movie to respect for its workmanlike craft than for a modicum of riveting tension.

Rated R. 158 minutes (c) 2012 by Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online

Overall – B-