Girl with the drags-on tattoo...

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Lena Endre, Peter Haber
Director: Niels Arden Oplev
Rating: ** and a half (out of 5)

Summary: When a young, unorthodox hacker is asked to look into the private life of a left wing journalist, she becomes entangled in the unsolved case of a 16 year old girl's disappearance 40 years earlier...

There's no doubt this will be a tough sell for anybody who hasn't already invested themselves in the best selling Millenium trilogy of books. Lisbeth Salander is a troubled character. Her moral compass twisting and turning, the result of a life full of sexual exploitation, neglectful parents, crime and death.

Having her at the centre of the film makes for an uncomfortable viewing experience, something which it struggles to deal with as it flirts with the possibility of being your standard thriller fodder (product placement, Google searches and clues pinned to the wall), only to be dragged into a seedy and perverse world every 20 minutes and in graphic detail.

The uneven tone of the film means that the running time becomes a problem at some points as moments of tension are dragged out too long for the audience to care. We may occasionally frown on Hollywood for is cut and paste approach to book adaptations, but The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo would certainly have benefited from someone taking a pair of scissors to the reel. Or at least having a director with a stronger vision than just a simple page by page book to screen translation.

But for all its faults, when the movie does focus on Lisbeth's life it's edgy and riveting - the sleaze oozes from the celluloid. Noomi Rapace giving a fantastic performance, equally terrifying and heartbreaking. It's just a shame that her presence is such that the film suffers when she's not on the screen.

Murder. Anal rape. Sexual assault with a 10 inch dildo. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is certainly not an episode of Columbo. I can't imagine what his iconic "just one more thing" catchphrase would eventually lead to but i'm sure he wouldn't like it too much. Or maybe he would, you never did get to meet his wife.