The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Though it doesn't bring with it the box office clout of the Twilight books (maybe it's the rapes, incest, serial killings and bisexuality), Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is its own kind of juggernaut, with 15 million copies in print and a small legion of fanboys eager to support the film's director, David Fincher (The Social Network, Fight Club, Benjamin Button), holiday returns should be good for this slice of psychopathic entertainment.

But what makes Fincher's involvement so perplexing is that he seemed to put the serial killer genre to bed with Zodiac, a meditation on the grim toll of pursuing boogeymen for reasons other than justice. It made the perfect thematic bookend to his Se7en, a wickedly moral deconstruction of the genre, implicating genre fans in the villain's self-aggrandizing goals. On the surface, Fincher seems like a natural fit for the brutish, nihilistic dread that characterizes Larsson's novel. But even with its strong-willed female lead (terrain Fincher has explored in other studio-driven work like Panic Room and Alien 3), he's clearly above the material. As gorgeously composed as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is, it feels like an artist slumming for a paycheck. Neither fans of the book nor fanboys who love the director will be disappointed — which tells you something about the commercial instincts on display.

A-list screenwriter Steven Zaillian has shaved, cut and pasted the novel's plot elements while remaining shackled to Larsson's convoluted and exposition-filled tale. Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig) is hired to investigate the death of Harriet Vanger, who disappeared from her family's island enclave nearly 40 years ago. Her uncle Henrik (Christopher Plummer) believes that one of his odious relatives, many of whom are Nazis, is responsible. (You just can't beat Nazi evil as fuel for your soap operatic fire.) While searching for the truth, Blomkvist teams up with computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a skulking badass bisexual who's been abused by both individuals and the state and exacts righteous fury against men who hate women (the original title to Larsson's novel).

As drama, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo's mystery is humorless and relentlessly linear, diligently doling out backstory and clues without surprise or ambiguity. There are no blind alleys or red herrings, just a gorgeously stylized march to a conclusion that isn't all that hard to figure out. It's the kind of drama that's written in all-caps and underlining, should you miss any of its points. It also boasts a lurid literalness that inspires Fincher to — I kid thee not — turn a cat into a bloody swastika.

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