The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (18) (From The Northern Echo)

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (18)

11:45am Thursday 11th March 2010 in

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Stars: Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre, Sven-bertil Taube.

153 mins

★★★★★

THE statistics linked to Stieg Larsson’s bestselling Millennium trilogy – of which The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is the opener – are staggering. More than ten million copies have been sold worldwide, including over one million in the UK. But, as we have learnt from past experience, good books can all too easily make bad movies.

Happily, that isn’t the case here.

Niels Arden Oplev’s film emerges as a classic thriller with lashings of horrible violence and kinky sex as well as a whodunit element to keep you guessing until the end.

This is a rarity – a truly satisfying cinematic thriller that maintains its pace and interest for the length of a running time close to two-and-a-half hours. Only those who can’t cope with subtitles should steer clear.

Journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Nyqvist)has the chance to do one last job – investigate a long unresolved family disappearance. Henry Vanger (Taube) wants him to find out once and for all what happened to his daughter who vanished mysteriously without trace.

Blomkvist recruits an ace computer hacker with a mysterious past Lisbeth Salander (Rapace), the girl with the titular tattoo, to assist on the case. As the trail leads to a tangled family tree with Nazi links and hints of ritualistic murder, the girl’s past is revealed. The good news is that the second and third books have already been filmed and ready for release later this year.