She Likes to Watch

Noomi Rapace plays the title character in "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo."

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” lives up to the hype

Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, the stalwart investigators in the Swedish thriller “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” make an interesting pair.

He’s an aging punk-rock journalist just six months away from a prison sentence. His hacker sidekick is a hot, heavily pierced and tattooed Goth girl with a tragic past –  at once fragile and fierce.

Yet, despite their differences, together they’re one of the most fascinating teams seen on the silver screen.

As the film opens, Mikael (Michael Nyqvist)  is facing three months behind bars for falsely accusing business magnate Hans-Erik Wennerström (Stefan Sauk) of fraud.

Mikael believes he was framed, but he voluntarily gives up his position with the muckraking business magazine Millennium in order to take a more tempting assignment.

Aging entrepreneur Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) has hired the journalist to investigate his daughter’s disappearance 40 years earlier.

Henrik believes that Harriet was murdered, possibly by a member of his large, rapacious family. And since Harriet was Mikael’s childhood babysitter, he has a personal stake in finding her killer.

No sooner has Mikael set up shop on the family estate, located on a tiny island several hours from Stockholm, than he’s contacted by Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a wire-thin hacker with a photographic memory and a knack for research.

Together, the two set out to solve the mystery of the missing girl, unearthing long-buried family secrets and uncovering the trail of a fiendish serial killer who has stalked Swedish women for 40 years.

A tightly crafted thriller with intense action sequences and shocking revelations to spare, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” easily lives up to the hype generated by its literary inspiration — the international best-seller by Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson.

Its title character, played to perfection by Noomi Rapace, is equally electrifying.

The young actress fearlessly embodies the mix of vulnerability and strength that makes Lisbeth so compelling. Co-star Michael Nyqvist, meanwhile, provides a bemused, berumpled counterpoint to Lisbeth’s anti-social eccentricities.

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is not rated, but the often disturbing subject matter and imagery warrants a hard ‘R.’

Lisbeth’s interactions with an abusive guardian (Peter Andersson) are not for the squeamish, and the movie deals with abuse, neglect, murder, mental illness and torture — not to mention a string of carved-up corpses. (It’s worth noting that the film’s original title translates to “Men Who Hate Women.”)

Yet, for all its wince-worthy moments, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is infinitely watchable. And it’s followed by two equally scintillating sequels in Larsson’s “Millenium Trilogy.”

With any luck, we’ll be watching the unlikely but perfect pairing of Lisbeth and Mikael for months to come.

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“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” opens Friday at The Palm Theatre, 817 Palm St. in San Luis Obispo.

The second film in the series, “The Girl Who Played with Fire,” opens at the Palm on July 30, and series finale “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest” is scheduled to arrive in October or November.

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Image courtesy of the official site for “The Girl WIth the Dragon Tattoo.”