Fiery Mara, cool Craig drive Hollywood remake of Swedish hit - Entertainment, Movies - Navy Times

Fiery Mara, cool Craig drive Hollywood remake of Swedish hit

Hollywood has commandeered Sweden’s big literary export, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” without compromising the story’s Scandinavian roots or its top-of-the-world, seasonal affective disorder sense of barrenness.

It could have been transplanted stateside for American audiences, but thankfully, what happens in Sweden stays in Sweden in David Fincher’s stark but enthralling adaptation of the first novel in late author Stieg Larsson’s trilogy.

Its harsh emotional terrain, where cruelty flourishes and compassion suffocates, could have wound up softened and sweetened, yet this was an ideal match of filmmaker and material.

Here’s the really good news: This movie kicks ass. Rooney Mara, who had a small role in Fincher’s “The Social Network,” gives a controlled detonation of a performance as traumatized victim-turned-avenger Lisbeth Salander. Mara is the breakout star of the year, a cold, detached waif in form but a fearsome, merciless zealot in spirit.

How strange it is to say that the nice guy here is Daniel Craig — who, of all the big-screen James Bonds, comes closest to the nasty, tortured soul Ian Fleming created.

Mara and Craig make an indomitable screen pair, he nominally leading their intense search into decades-old serial killings, she surging ahead, plowing through obstacles with flashes of phenomenal intellect and eruptions of physical fury.

A ward of the state since an act of childhood violence, Lisbeth has been at the mercy, and mostly the malice, of others for so long that she anticipates and incorporates their brutality into her own calculations for maintaining control of her life.

A computer hacker, Lisbeth finds occasional employment with a security company, for whom she runs a not-too-legal background check on disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Craig).

The company’s client, retired industrialist Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) hires Mikael to make a last-ditch effort to find out who killed his beloved teenage grand-niece, who vanished 40 years earlier.

Mikael persuades aloof, suspicious Lisbeth — who has every reason in the world to revile men — to join his investigation.

Craig is an anchor of cool rationality and judiciousness around which Mara revolves like a demon, wan, scrawny, scarier than any of the night creatures in Hollywood’s glut of vampire movies.

This is a team that deserves an encore, and Larsson left behind two more novels loaded with dark doings for Lisbeth and Mikael. We haven’t seen the last of this tattooed girl.