Based on the first of three international best-selling thrillers by Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo plays out like a giallo for the The Da Vinci Code set. Dragon's middlebrow police procedural plot relies heavily on the kind of ghoulish sadism that is the giallo's bread-and-butter. A vital part of the backstory of titular girl Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace) stems from a rape-revenge subplot that is so blunt and reprehensibly exploitative that it's amazing that the film and the books its based on are such big money-makers. It's especially vile considering the way the film disavows its sexism by makings its villain a Bible-quoting misogynist with ties to the Nazi party. Even the film's hero, Mikael (Michael Nyqvist), an uncompromising journalist that accepts a job tracking down a missing woman, is never rebuffed for his own modest streak of sexism. In fact it's encouraged considering that it's built into Lisbeth's character: she pursues him from the start, making him the blameless seducee and never the active sexual predator. If the film's generic history of women's lib in Sweden can be believed, Swedes went from hating females to just treating them like fallen women that need to be humanized through rape and protracted one-night stand relationships. Now that's what I call progress.
Were The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo retitled I Sh*t on Your Grave: The Reckoning, it might be possible to accept the film's empty-headed portrayal of Lisbeth as a mysterious, over-sexed creature with piercings, a faux-hawk and a gnarly tattoo ("How did you get to be this way?" a boorish Mikael asks her post-coitus). She's the girl of Mikael's dreams and the person that can help him crack the case, though he never admits to his employers that she's working with him. When asked by them to explain himself, he says that his personal life has nothing to do with the case, keeping Lisbeth a secret and patronizing her as a helpless babe in the woods. In this light, Lisbeth's acts of badass revanchist violence - Bloody tattoos! Bondage! Sodomy! - look less like the bitter victories of a heroine you can respect than a sexy coquette that is used by Mikael just as she's used by the filmmakers. She's a means to a decidedly sleazy end, not a character, let alone a side-kick.
