Dragon Tattoo remake 'prettier' but adds nothing new

What you need to know
American film-maker David Fincher (The Social Network and Fight Club) directs an English-language version of the The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, released in the UK on Boxing Day.

Like the earlier Swedish-language version, starring Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace, it is adapted from the first novel in Swedish author Stieg Larsson's best-selling Millennium trilogy. That version was well received – especially for Rapace's performance as the androgynous punk hacker Lisbeth Salander.

In the new version, James Bond star Daniel Craig takes on the role of Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced Stockholm journalist who accepts a commission to find out the fate of the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. Relative newcomer Rooney Mara plays his sleuthing partner Salander.

What the critics like
If only more high-concept Hollywood thrillers were as supple, muscular and gripping, says Xan Brooks in The Guardian. "In less experienced hands, this would surely have wound up as lurid, trashy pulp."

Fincher plays it straight and keeps it serious, adds Brooks. "He brings a sense of space and rough edges to a machine-tooled plotline that bounces us remorselessly from clue to clue."

While perverse sex crimes are the visceral core of the film, it is really a story about the hunt for information, says Hugh Hart in Wired. But it "transcends procedural data-based drama" through Rooney Mara's breakthrough performance as Salander, alongside a strong cast of veterans including Craig and Christopher Plummer.

A score by Oscar-winning composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (The Social Network) also helps transform "otherwise static data-collecting scenes into tension-filled scenarios".

What the critics don't like
Audacious! Dynamic! Inspired! But that's only the credit sequence, said Jonathan Romney in The Independent. What follows is "beautifully shot" but "dramatically inert".

The notorious scenes of graphic sexual abuse prove to be a major stumbling block, says Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. "They're lurid and sweaty in a way that's tonally discordant with the rest of the story".

As for the 'surprise villain', adds Collin, just as in the original film, "the role's so unsubtle that the actor or actress might as well be wearing a pair of hen party devil horns and carrying a plastic pitchfork".

It's a well-wrought simulacrum of the original, says Richard Corliss in Time. But seeing Fincher's version "is like getting a Christmas gift of a book you already have". It's a nicer edition with prettier illustrations than your beloved old paperback, "but it's essentially a reproduction of the same old dragon. Dragon Tat-two." ·