"The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is a Swedish-made movie with English subtitles, but don't think for a moment that "Made in
Sweden" is the stamp of an inferior movie. This one rivets you from the very start, and not once during the 2 hour and 35 minute movie did I think it was dragging and running much too long. Since being released in Sweden in 2009, and in America in 2010, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" is already the highest grossing Swedish movie of all time.
"The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," which was brilliantly directed by Niels Arden Oplev, is based on the first of a trilogy of novels by Stieg Larsson novel entitled "Men Who Hate Woman." That fact is horribly evident, as in this movie, woman are brutalized and killed, and in one scene, horribly raped. Most of the murders, and there were a sting of them spanning 55 years, are discovered after the fact, and it isn't until the movie's surprise ending that we fully realize the scope of the atrocities.
The movie starts with the trial of Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a journalist who works for the powerhouse magazine Millennium. Blomkvist is falsely convicted of libel against a corrupt Swedish industrialist, and he and the magazine are ordered to pay damages, while Blomkvist is ordered to serve 6-9 months in prison. While waiting to serve his sentence, Blomkvist is approached by Henrik Vanger, the eighty-something member of the wealthy Vanger Group, to find the murder of his niece Harriet some forty years earlier, when she was only 16. What makes things more spicy, is that her body was never found, and we're left with the impression in the back of our minds that maybe she isn't really dead after all.
After he begins his investigation, Blomkvist realizes he's being followed, photographed and his computer hacked by punk rocker (complete with dual nose rings) Lisbeth Salander, played by Swedish/Spanish actress Noomi Raspeth, in one of the most memorable female performances of the past 25 years. Lisbeth is an expert hacker, who has a troubled past and who may have even set her own father on fire, to stop his sexual advances.
During the course of the movie, she gets beaten up by a gang of punks, has a lesbian scene with her lover and is forced to perform oral sex on her evil probation guardian. Then on her next visit to him, he brutally rapes her, in a scene that made my hair stand straight on end. But good triumphs over evil (well, sort of) when Lisbeth exacts her revenge in a scene so deliciously brutal and visually satisfying, a rousing round of applause was in order and was gladly given.
As the plot begins to unfold, Lisbeth sends Blomkvist anonymous clues to help him find the truth about the disappearance of Vander's niece, and soon they are both working together, sleeping together (there's one great sex scene), and fighting the forces of evil together. He gets brutally beaten, shot at and grazed in the cheek, and finally hung from his neck by a pulley manned by the movie's ultimate bad guy. Lisbeth rides to his rescue, on a motorcycle of course, and saves the day. After getting Blomkvist's neck out of the noose, she chases the bad guy in his car until he crashes. Then she watches him pleaded for help (as she smirks), and his overturned car goes up in flames. Oops and Ka-Boom!
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