The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo –  review

Over the last fifteen years or so, we've come to expect David Fincher to deliver the best thrillers in town; even those films considered his relative failures (such as Zodiac) have been bracing, compelling affairs thanks to the director's effortless balance between brittle darkness and storytelling verve.

No surprises then, that his remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is in lots of ways a superior re-imagining. It's true that, although hardly Americanised, this new version tones down the original's cultural European subtleties - and indeed subtitles - but it also amps up the fear, violence and cinematic smoothness.

Daniel Craig is both likably bumbling and believably tough as the journo hired to decide which member of an aristocratic family is responsible for a string of foul woman killings, while Rooney Mara lends an intense single-mindedness to the role of the hyper-intelligent and preemptively defensive techno-goth Lisbeth Salander.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo's main flaw is that it's a detective story which doesn't invite its audience to understand the piecing together of its clues - preferring Macbook babblings and fast editing to get its mystery-explaining done.

However, it's pretty ice-cool otherwise: Trent Reznor's soundtrack captures the undercurrent of demented madness that is finally manifested in the film's villain, while Fincher uses excitingly sweeping camerawork and moments of repulsive sadism to deliver (yet another) classy thriller.

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