The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Unlikey Alliances

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Rated: R Graphic Nudity, Brutal Violent Content, Torture, Language, Rape and Strong Sexuality
Release Date: December 21, 2011
Runtime: 2 hrs 38 min

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Director: David Fincher
Writers: Steven Zaillian, novel by Stieg Larsson
Cast: Daniel Craig, Rooney Mara, Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård, Robin Wright, Steven Berkoff

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SYNOPSIS: After a lawsuit leaves a journalist at the wrong end of a career he takes an assignment to investigate a 40-year-old murder. Making some headway, he requests a brilliant but troubled research assistant to help him.

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REVIEW: Director David Fincher has helmed such unique fare as Flght Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and intense mysteries like Zodiac. Based on the first of a trilogy of international best selling novels known as the "Millennium Trilogy" published posthumously by the Swedish author Steig Larsson, Fincher takes on Americanized version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (from the book translated to "Men Who Hate Women" and the 2009 Swedish produced film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Does Fincher's version live up to the hype worthy of the international best-selling books and the original film trilogy?

Millennium Magazine journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig, Quantum of Solace) emerges on the losing end of a libel lawsuit against a billionaire financier named Wennerström. As his savings disappears for damages and his magazine starts to flounder financially, Mikael is vetted then approached by Frode (Steven Berkoff, The Tourist) on behalf of Hendrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer, Priest), a retired businessman who has obsessed over the disappearance of his granddaughter Harriet (Moa Garpendal) over 40 years ago and has feared that she was murdered. As Mikael digs into the family's background and past under the guise of Hendrick's researcher for his own memoirs Mikael struggles to find the connections to the clues he has access to. Eventually, with a thin shred of proof and an gut feeling, Mikael requests the assistance of the genius troubled antisocial computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara, The Social Network) the researcher who originally vetted him for the project to begin with.

Clocking in at 158 minutes, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo would seem to be too large a commitment to be worth while. On the contrary, Fincher's experience and style lends perfectly to the slow building mystery set before Craig's Mikael and Mara's Lisbeth. The anticipation of following the detectives using their own methods hooks you from the start. In fact, Mikael and Lisbeth do not actually meet face to face until the second half of the film. But while Mikael starts his investigation as a retreat from his own personal and professional problems, Lisbeth endures her own internal and external demons as she tries to make it on her own as a ward of the state with the albatross of being labeled as criminally incompetent.

Starting with the abstract introduction of the Karen O and Trent Reznor's amped up rendition of Led Zepplin's "The Immigrant Song", Reznor's scores soon recede to buzzing and pops that prod at the back of the brain like an itch that can't be scratched. Minimalistic in nature from an impressionist point of view, Reznor and Atticus Ross's work focuses the audience's attention into the fabric of Fincher's dark story and gray settings.   

If unfamiliar with the novels or the original films, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a sometimes brutal, sometimes beautiful, graphic film. Showing nudity and violence, Fincher never puts anything on display in a gratuitous manner. Some of the acts of brutality borders on the obscene and may offend some movie-goers' threshold tolerances, but rest assured that there is meaning in everything. Rooney Mara is the standout performance as Lisbeth Salander, her brilliant character both off-putting and sympathetic.

A fresh eye for this first entry of the Americanized "Millennium" trilogy, having read any of the novels or watched any of the original films, Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a serious slow building take at the brutality that man can inflict on man, or on women. Since I did not have previous works to rely on to spoil the ending of this version, I came away entertained and in awe of what good story, great characters, and fine direction can accomplish.

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WORTH: Matinee and DVD

Priest

Not Much To Sink Your Teeth Into

Director: Scott Stewart

Writers: Cory Goodman, Min-Woo Hyung

Stars: Paul Bettany, Cam Gigandet, Maggie Q, Karl Urban, Lily Collins, Christopher Plummer

SYNOPSIS: After centuries of war between humans and vampires, a tentative peace has been reached. With humans living behind the walls of mega-cities under church laws, vampires have prospered and gained strength. When his niece is kidnapped by the vampires, a warrior priest disobeys church doctrine to track her down.

Very loosely based on the original Korean comic graphic novel by Hyung Min-Woo and written by rookie film writer Cory Goodman, veteran visual effects man and Legion director Scott Charles Stewart re-teams with Paul Bettany for Priest. Gone are the zombies, the twelve fallen angels, and the rich complex story line from the comic, replaced with hordes of vampires and warrior priests. And instead of taking place in the times of the Crusades, the 19th century Wild West and modern day, Priest takes place in an alternate Earth's post-apocalyptic future.

The setting of the film alternates from the dark, ash-filled industrial religion run society with a look similar to Judge Dread and George Romero's Land of the Dead to a bright stark desert wasteland that hearkens back to Road Warrior: Beyond Thunderdome. Even the climax of the film tears a page out of Beyond Thunderdome's third act with the use of a desert train chase.

Priest strays wildly from the source material, and those who are not familiar with Min-Woo Hyung's graphic novel come away with a straight-forward vampire hunter revenge flick while fans of the Priest comic will be critical of the end product. Paul Bettany returns in great physical form as the dedicated warrior title character. Now that the wars against the vampires is over and the rest of the bloodsuckers have been forced on penal reservations, the warrior priests have been forced back into the general society structure within one of many mega-cities that the last of civilization cower within under the rule and protection of the Clergy.

When his brother Owen and his family is attacked, and niece is kidnapped, Priest disobeys Clergy doctrine in order to hunt down those responsible. Christopher Plummer stars as the head monsignor Orelas of the Clergy, bow beating and looking down on Priest with wonderful disdain and entitlement. Cam Gigandet joins the film as the wasteland Sheriff Hicks who enlists Priest's help, complete with a perfect 5 o'clock shadow and a knife throwing demonstration and target shooting right out of The Magnificent Seven. The antagonist simply named Black Hat (Karl Urban) steals his scenes with his ultra cool ex-priest, current-vampire hybrid performance. Finally, the women of the film, Priestess (Maggie Q) and the niece Lucy (Lily Collins), make good impressions, but are stunted by their lack of screen time. One good move made was that the vampires, other than Black Hat, are sightless, over-sized fanged mutants rather than glamorized pretty boys.

Although coming in at a vamp's tooth under 90 minutes, Priest still slowing plods along as it sets up the action scenes. One of the beginning scenes where Priest confesses to a prerecorded monsignor via a public confession booth and a microphone gives us a taste of a society that could have been explored further. One of the first larger action sequences in the bowels of the vampire "reservation" camps uses the smokey darkness to effective and creepy success. And in the climatic third act train chase, we are treated to a triad of cool sequences, from a furious fight atop the train cars between Priest and Black Hat, to Hicks moving through the rail cars trying to find Lucy, to Priestess looking to destroy the rail line while fighting off masked motorcycle marauders.

Whether in 2D or 3D, Priest should have tried to stay closer to its origins. The film is tight and somewhat steady but, ultimately, left me drained.

WORTH: Matinee or Netflix