Almost as pointless as covering Led Zeppel- oh.

David Fincher has always been a filmmaker I've felt that I should like more than I do. I mean sure, I think Se7en is one of the stone-cold best films of the 90s and I'm of the (not at all big enough) camp that believes Zodiac to be even better. Hell, I even have time for the assembly cut of Alien³ most days. Here's a director with two honest-to-god masterpieces under his belt and a strong vision all of his own. And yet, I find it very difficult to ever get very excited about any new film he brings out. You see, David Fincher has fucking awful taste in projects. Alien³? Forgivable, he was an unproven music video director at the time. But then after proving to the world he was someone to pay attention to with Se7en, he followed it up with Fight Club, a film of consummate craftsmanship that is unbearably obnoxious on the rare occasions that it isn't downright offensive. Panic Room has already been condemned by history and needs no help from me, so I will settle for describing it as 'baffling', and the only outright 'bad' film of his ouevre. Zodiac was magnificent and very much a logical next step for the director of Se7en and a sign that he was well on his way to a bright future. So of course he followed it up with the unspeakably dull Benjamin Button, a film so competent and airless that it's not even interesting enough to be bad. Naturally, it went over well with the Academy, and having got a foot in the door at the Oscars, he returned with the edgy and topical The Social Network, a witty but forgettable script by the vastly overrated Aaron Sorkin that was never unenjoyable but ultimately forgettable and felt like a waste of the efforts of many very, very talented people. Now he's back with an adaptation of tepid bestselling thriller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and it's not entirely mediocre. And that ends up being kind of the problem.

I perhaps shouldn't have gone on at such length to start with. The thing, you see, is that there is very little less interesting than talking about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. By this point in time the vast majority of people will be familiar with the story: disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (in this version played by Daniel Craig) is invited to an island in the north of Sweden to investigate the 40-year-old disappearance of Harriet Vanger at the request of her still-grieving uncle Henrik (Christopher Plummer, who treats his dialogue like it's a race and babbles out exposition with no emotion other than the vague sense that he'd rather be elsewhere). During his investigation he crosses paths with the titular Girl, Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a royally fucked-up ward of the state who has been dealing with an abusive carer (Yorick van Wageningen) and they join forces to get to the bottom of things, then Stieg Larsson complains about finance speculators for a hundred fucking pages.

It's likely anyone interested in TGWTDT is already familiar with one of its earlier incarnations, be it the book or the Swedish film, later adapted into a TV series as well. I certainly am - in fact, I was already pretty much sick of the story by the time this version came around. The mystery at the core is not without its appeal, but it's hardly one for the ages, and the socially conscious window-dressing feels staler and staler with every retelling.

None of this is the fault of Fincher or his incredibly talented team - in particular, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's score betters even their own masterful work on Social Network, and longtime Fincher collaborators Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall's gunshot editing is propulsive and timed within an inch of its life. Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth paints Sweden in a pallette of slate greys and sickly fluorescent yellows that is initially perfectly atmospheric and gloomy but becomes tiresome by the end of the film's 158 minutes (a compromise with the studio - Fincher's original cut runs three hours and thank god for someone with sense stepping in). It's technically flawless and not even without its fair share of artistic merit, but it feels like so much wasted breath on (and even sometimes at odds with) Steven Zailian's functional script or even Stieg Larsson's by-turns dry and vaguely sleazy novel. It's impossible in any meaningful way to call the Swedish version a better film, but something about that version's TV-level production values and artistic sensibilities felt more appropriate to the quality of the story it was telling.

The only remarkable part of either film version, really, is its leading lady. I'm more partial to Noomi Rapace's turn in the Swedish film, who tapped some incredibly dark places to find a version of Lisbeth Salander who might actually exist. Fans of the book will likely prefer Mara's decision to play the character as written; much more artificially a Character, she still acquits herself just fine playing the hell out of it. Craig, meanwhile, is miles away from the bland charm of the original's Michael Nyqvist, happy to play the character as weary and grumpy and kind of an asshole in an incredibly magnetic way. The Swedish film landed Rapace international stardom and the chance to break into Hollywood, a move which I hope and pray pays dividends, but only time will tell. Mara doesn't seem to have attracted quite the same accolades, but with an Oscar nomination* under her belt her future looks bright all the same. If it means more performances of this calibre in future then I wish her the best of luck, and promise to try my best not to think of her as 'that girl who sleepwalked through the dreary Nightmare on Elm Street remake'.

Ultimately there's nothing concrete I can really criticise about TGWTDT beyond how damn unecessary it feels. But at the same time it's hard to respond to it with anything more than muted enthusiasm. And I'd have liked to have been able to respond to something that so many great people have toiled over with something more than such faint praise. It's frustrating in a way that nothing in the film can make up for. Maybe next time, David. I hope so. I really do.

6/10

*Hasn't got a hope in hell of winning, though.

La Dolce Vita

A Bittersweet Life (a bastardisation of the original title which translates to "The Sweet Life", because irony is a lost art) is very eager to tell the audience that it isn't fucking around. "Get the hell out of my way" it says to the opening credits as cameras swoop and fly and track in a whirlwind with Kim Sun-woo (Lee Byung-hun) in the eye, finishing his meal and methodically going about his job as an employee of crime boss Kang (Kim Yeong-chol), effortlessly dispatching a group of rowdy thugs from a high-class hotel. This almost-wordless, frenetic opening sequence is almost all the character introduction we get for the rest of the film, and woe betide the audience member who isn't paying attention.

From there things fall into place fairly neatly. In a nutshell, Sun-woo is left to mind the shop for Kang while he's in Shanghai for a few days and is for the first time forced to re-evaluate his lifestyle for reasons that are not made explicit until the end of the film, if ever, but are easy enough to guess at, and he commits a couple of fuck-ups that leave him at the mercy of his own boss as well as rival kingpin President Baek (Hwang Jeong-min). With nowhere to run and seemingly nothing to live for, Sun-woo grits his teeth and swears revenge on everyone involved and from there it's off to the races.

It's a pretty well-worn story, but that's hardly a complaint in the face of where it allows director Kim Jee-woon to take things. He cites Le Samourai and Scarface (a combination which should already have eyebrows raised) as inspirations, but there's obviously more than a few overt influences at work here. The strongest voice in the film, however, is plainly that of Kim Jee-woon, and when he e.g. brazenly lifts a shot straight from Taxi Driver it's done to dynamo effect, one of a dozen grace notes that make the film just that little bit richer.

Jee-Woon is known primarily for being a bit of a magpie with genre, cherrypicking imagery, plot elements and techniques from any number of diverse and questionably compatible kinds of films and weaving them together into his own elaborate tapestry. The core of this particular frankenstein's monster is undoubtedly film-noir, with all the monochromatic palette and rise-and-fall, me-against-the-world plot setup you'd expect to follow. Following probably less expectedly are fight scenes staged like a martial arts movie or a climactic shootout that looks for all the world like a Hong Kong action movie or a handful of scenes that are straight-up gangster pastiche or so-on. It's a testament to Jee-woon's own strong visual sensibility that he's able to make it feel like part of a unified whole, in addition to being damn snazzy moment-to-moment.

And make no mistake, the thing looks fucking snazzy. I already mentioned the traditional noir colour scheme and all the delightful, shadowy compositions that it entails, but it's accompanied by flawless* cinematography that makes everything look shiny and sleek and Expensive in a very pointed and deliberate way as well as a handful of motifs that serve to provide the thematic meat and potatoes without ever forcing the script to slow everything down and throw the audience a bone to chew on. Combined with wonderful arrhythmic, abrupt editing it results in a film as driven as its protagonist that feels about a third as long as its two-hours-on-the-nose running time, and that's never a bad thing.

It's these visual reminders of the sheer inconsequence of Sun-woo's lost lifestyle that let A Bittersweet Life, like fellow genre-bending revenge story Kill Bill (and dammit I was trying so very hard to avoid comparisons to Tarantino or Miike in this review), have its cake and eat it too, providing a slick and exciting thriller edifice while constantly reminding us just how unfulfilling it ultimately is. That's overselling it all a wee bit though, though - A Bittersweet Life is first and foremost a crowd-pleaser, and an enormously successful one. That it is a formally audacious and unusually thoughtful one to boot is simply the icing on a cake that is very sweet indeed.

*Assuming that the lousy colour reproduction was a feature of the DVD I was watching and not the film.