Wick's Review

Summary - Good 3.0

American remakes of foreign movies work best when they’re moved to America. Otherwise they can seem phony, which is the case with David Fincher’s remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Fake Swedish accents are one hurdle. A kitschy feel is another. A merely OK Lizbeth Salander doesn’t help.

The result is a merely good movie, one that feels unnecessary given the Swedish original.

Not lost in translation is the utter perversity of the story, which combines fashionable anti-capitalist politics with feminist blood-lust fantasies.

Given that parts two and three of the Swedish trilogy went downhill from a great part one, Fincher would be ill advised to make sequels of this merely good movie, else they end down in bad territory. But the sequels will surely follow if Fincher’s Girl does big business, since Hollywood decries capitalism while operating as its most craven exponent.

Acting - Good 3.0

Rooney Mara goes all in as Lizbeth Salander, and does OK. Nothing to be ashamed of. The girl with the ultimate NFL name ain’t no Noomi Rapace however. Skinny not wiry, more pretty than sharp, and struggling with a fake accent, she never seems entirely present in the role. Noomi Rapace’s Lizbeth Salander had good reason to appear dissociated but never did. She was 100% in every moment.

Daniel Craig fares better as her leading man. The rest of the cast is also very good, especially the inimitable Christopher Plummer as a great man struggling with a family tragedy.

Still they all sound phony speaking with supposed Swedish accents.

Film - Good 3.0

David Fincher is a great stylist with a talent for spinning sordid tales. However, his film fails to measure up to Niels Arden Oplev’s original. For instance, Fincher misses the serial killer giving up the ghost, one of the original’s high points.

Edge - Horrid 3.6

Oddly, Fincher’s version is more exploitative though less edgy than the original. It’s still horrid, even if Fincher pulls his punches a bit in depicting the central rape scene.

Reality - Glib 1.5

2 Comments

• Wick Jan 15, 2012 10:56AM

  Regarding Wick’s Review
  Good point, Randy. I probably would have rated it higher, though the phoniness of an English language movie set in Sweden probably would have still rankled.

• Randy Jan 15, 2012 10:19AM

  Regarding Wick’s Review
  Very nice review, Wick. A lot of this review is based off of a comparison to the original Swedish flick. I wonder if and how your opinions may have differed if you had seen Fincher’s “Girl” before the Swedish original, as was the case with me.

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