Homegrown adaptation by Niels Arden Oplev of the international best-seller by Stieg Larsson, from the Scandinavian wave of detective novels. The movie, like the book, is long: two and a half hours with almost half an hour of anti- or post-climax. In the early going, it juggles two separate cases and two separate investigators, a Leftist muckraking journalist (Michael Nyqvist, with his Richard Burtonish full-moon cratered face) and a security-firm computer geek (Noomi Rapace, a sort of young Claire Bloom) who sports two nose rings, numerous ear piercings, a Goth hairdo and wardrobe, and of course the titular tattoo over her entire back. Eventually the two investigators team up on the sketchier and shakier of the cases: the forty-year-old disappearance and presumed murder of a teenage girl whose body, on a sealed-off island, was never recovered. Mystery fans’ alarm bells will begin ringing even before the girl’s favorite uncle explains how she was in the habit of giving him an annual framed botanical and how he has continued annually to receive an anonymous framed botanical which he theorizes has been sent tauntingly by her killer. Kooky theory. Perhaps our indignity over the multiple revelations of ugly sexual violence is hoped to blind us to the shoddy plotting and the plodding development. (That, and perhaps also the cracklingly crisp photography.) But the would-be “touching” ending will be soured by the unasked question of how many women were raped, tortured, and murdered over those forty years so that we could have a touching ending. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.