The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Quickie Review

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (original title in Swedish: Män som hatar kvinnor – "Men Who Hate Women") - ‎This Swedish English-subtitled suspense/thriller‎ based on the award-winning crime novel by the late Swedish writer Stieg Larsson and directed by Niels Arden Oplev is, in a word, phenomenal. If you’re a crime-thriller aficionado you so owe it to yourself to check out this very stylized, explicitly original foreign film starring Peter Haber, Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, David Dencik, and Georgi Staykov. Seriously, the OMG did that just happen factor is off the charts. Yet it is not exploitive or gratuitous but rather a brutally sad reminder of the magnitude of its horrific subject matter.


Noomi Rapace as hacker Lisbeth Salander

On the edge of your seat and gasping for a break, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo never dumbs down or numbs out as the acting is completely on fire, especially Goth-queen, dragon-tattooed, brains n' beauty Noomi Rapace as hacker Lisbeth Salander - Wow. She carries the film in such a way as to remind even a die-hard Jody Foster fan, that there are other actors with her talent hiding in the shadows of films abroad.

Synopsis
Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger clan. Her beloved uncle is convinced it was murder and that the killer is a member of his own tightly knit but dysfunctional family. He employs disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the tattooed and troubled but resourceful computer hacker Lisbeth Salander to investigate.

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R. O'Donnell and Kris Spence, photo by Eric Hoffhines


R. O'Donnell and Eric Hoffhines

"I feel like a domesticated cat or something. Shut up, R., I'm concentrating."
photo by Kris Spense (don't ask)