Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist who has just been convicted on charges of libel, is asked by an elderly industrialist to spend the months before he begins a prison term investigating the unsolved mystery of his niece’s disappearance and presumed death some 40 years in the past. Meanwhile, a punked-up goth-girl named Salander is using her computer-hacking skills to investigate Blomkvist and the missing person/murder mystery as well. Soon enough, the two of them become an odd-couple detective team in this long and somewhat coyly convoluted mystery tale. Niels Arden Oplev’s film has a high-toned art-house look and a cool sort of elegance to it, but only up to a point—after which the whole enterprise descends into some rather exploitative indulgences of several of its characters’ most brutal and gruesome impulses. Michael Nykvist and Noomi Rapace both make strikingly eccentric impressions in the lead roles, but Oplev’s film seems a half-hearted hodgepodge of genres and styles—part police procedural, part political thriller and exposé, with doses of revenge fantasy and psycho-killer porn thrown in for mostly puerile shock effect. Pageant Theatre. Not-rated .