Starring: Rooney Mara, Daniel Craig, Christopher Plummer, Joely Richardson
Director: David Fincher
Category: III
It's perhaps easy to be sceptical about David Fincher's take on the late Swedish writer Stieg Larsson's best-selling crime novel, given it's been just two years since Niels Arden Oplev delivered a Swedish-language adaptation that has since reaped both commercial and critical acclaim at home and abroad.
That the characters, who remain Swedish, speak English throughout the story would probably dismay purists, as would the way the film begins with an MTV-friendly opening-credits sequence and concludes with a final episode that plays out like a derring-do con trick in a border-hopping, jet-setting heist flick.
Guilty on all counts, yes, but to dismiss this new The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo as merely a cynical cashing in would be misguided.
Taken on its own merits, Fincher's film is a meaty suspense thriller about an odd couple's investigation of a string of unsolved serial murders from the grey and gloomy days of Sweden in the 1950s and 60s.
Indeed, it's territory that Fincher has trodden before with Se7en and Zodiac, but it's probably because of this that he has managed to reimagine Larsson's vision with power and poignancy, as he transforms what is essentially a procedural into a tale driven by a sense of general malaise in a society where communication has broken down.
'Does anybody speak to anybody on this island?' asks the journalist Michael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), as he hears his new employer, the tycoon Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), give him a rundown about the estranged members of the Vanger clan ('The most detestable collection of people you'll ever meet,' says the patriarch) to prepare him for the task of unearthing the truth behind the disappearance of the teenage Harriet Vanger 40 years earlier.