Brash, loud and off-the-hook intense, it sets the tone for David Fincher's film perfectly. Based on the Stieg Larsson novel, which spawned a Swedish film version in 2009, the movie plays to Fincher's strengths, and its dark elements and über-cool vibe combine to create a bracing pop-culture experience. The film is a little too over the top, a little too uneven and has at least a couple too many endings to be called great, but it's not for lack of trying on Fincher's part.
Or on Rooney Mara's. She is magnetic as Lisbeth Salander, the title character whose damaged life leads her to extremes. Also good, in a much more subtle way, is Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced journalist whose shot at redemption leads to much more than he bargained for.
The film opens with Blomkvist's conviction on charges of libeling Hans-Erik Wennerstrom (Ulf Friberg), a billionaire financier. This threatens the future of Millennium, the magazine he runs with his occasional lover, Erika Berger (Robin Wright). Then Blomkvist gets an offer out of the blue from Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer), an industrialist whose family helped build modern Sweden: He wants Blomkvist to live on the island his family has inhabited for generations and write a history of the clan and its industries.
But what he really wants is the solution to a mystery. His grandniece Harriet disappeared 40 years before, and Vanger is convinced that someone in the family had something to do with it. The disappearance haunts him, and he promises Blomkvist good money and revenge against Wennerstrom if he finds out what really happened.
Before offering Blomkvist the job, Vanger had the writer's background checked -- by Lisbeth, an expert computer hacker whose methods sometimes fall on the far side of legal. Tattooed, pierced and surly, she works for a security firm, but does things her own way.
Lisbeth has been in and out of trouble -- and mental hospitals -- most of her life, after a horrific childhood. (Her legal guardian had a stroke and her replacement guardian degraded and raped her, an act that led her to take harrowing revenge.)
Eventually, Blomkvist finds out that Lisbeth snooped on him and hires her to help dig up the dirt on the Vanger family, a motley bunch that includes a few ancient Nazis. As they search for the truth about Harriet, it becomes clear that there is more to the story: They appear to be on the trail of a serial killer of women.
The discovery inspires Lisbeth, and she and Blomkvist grow closer as they develop a unique relationship -- one that seems to puzzle Blomkvist as much as it puzzles us. At times, he seems more like an observer than a participant in the investigation, and Craig gives him some charm by playing bemused much of the time
It's Mara, though, who eventually takes over the film with her punked-out intensity. Her Lisbeth isn't just looking for information about other people. She's looking for herself, looking to feel something in a world that has wounded her time and again. Mara's performance has a ferocity that will linger in your mind long after the movie's two or three endings have faded from memory.
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