Ink Spots

In order to escape the huge amount of crap everywhere about that old lady being Queen for 60 years, I suggested to my better half that we venture out to rent a film for the night.

Naturally, it took about 20 minutes to come to any kind of vague consensus on what to choose, which got me wondering how many couples break up in the aisles of DVD rental shops. It's easy to get to a point where you just shout "well, pick what you fucking want then!" and storm out in a strop.

Mercifully, this didn't happen to us and I finally agreed to take out The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I hadn't read the books, crime fiction not being my thing, and the amount of hype around them doubly put me off.  As for the film? Well, it didn't do a lot to convince me to investigate further.

Not that it's a bad film. It certainly looks the part, with some nice contrasts between urban and rural Sweden, the rustic house the male lead inhabits with the clean lines of the modern house of another character.

The problems start with the characters, none of whom are particularly likeable. Daniel Craig as a disgraced journalist is requested by a wealthy industrialist to investigate the disappearance of his niece decades earlier. Thing is, the character is such a complete drip at times, and a total "anything with a pulse" shagger the next that it's hard to root for him in solving the mystery.

Then, of course, there's Oscar-nominee Rooney Mara as Lisbeth, the titular character and one made up of so many clichés it's amazing. Troubled past? Check. Socially awkward genius? Check. Just once, it'd be nice to see one of these characters who doesn't have a whole lot of dark shit in their past. It's almost like a game where writers try to come up with the worst horrors possible. To Mara's credit, she does a good job with what she's given to work with.

None of which might matter if the central story held up. But it's full of some major plot holes that lead up to a final twist that if you're paying enough attention you should see coming from a country mile off. Part of the problem is that it feels like the whole story would be best strapped to a TV mini-series, as at two-and-a-half hours, it takes too much time getting started but also doesn't have enough time to develop the details. As in, was the big cheese really waiting all those years just for some discredited hack to roll up? How did the owner of the torture chamber keep it a secret for years?

On the plus side, the vast majority of it is acted really well: Christopher Plummer and Steven Berkoff do their usual fine work as the man needing answers about his long-lost niece and the lawyer who gets Daniel Craig the job. Weirdly, Jim Robinson from Neighbours rocks up in a small role, which makes you wonder why they didn't hire more Swedish people for the parts, rather than getting others to do slightly dodgy accents.

It's a not a crap film, not by any measure. It's so average that I doubt I'll remember any of it in six months.