The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is as fine a mystery as you’re likely to see this year.

A Swedish film, Tattoo follows a rather ragged investigative journalist as he seeks to unravel the mysterious disappearance of a wealthy and beautiful young woman from an isolated island some 40 years before. The girl with the dragon tattoo is a cyber investigator with in interest in the reporter. She finds herself helping him in ways she hadn’t imagined.

That’s about all I want to tell you about the plot. Besides, it’s a mystery – the plot, more or less, takes care of itself. Characters make mysteries interesting, and the characters here, that of the journalist and the girl, are very interesting people.

The journalist has just been convicted of libel, and he faces a healthy jail term in the very near future. The girl is a tightly wound, exceptionally private genius who can do things with computers that only people who don’t know anything about computers think people can do. Neither of them look like movie stars; they don’t even look like people who’d get along with one another. Nevertheless, they make a great team: unafraid of hard work and research, they spend more time detecting than getting in fistfights, which is a nice change of pace from many American mystery films.

I found that I cared about these people. I felt for them in their moments of danger, I cheered for them in their moments of triumph, and I respected them while they were about the hard, tedious work of unraveling a dark and twisted mystery.

This is a well made film, with an unerring sense of pace and place, that wrapped me up and held me in its spell from beginning to end. I loved The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Undisputed III: Redemption

Look, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Undisputed III: Redemption is a great film.  It features a tired premise, uneven acting, and a penchant for Leone zooms that becomes downright distracting.  But it does know how to put together some exceptional fights.

Redemption uses the tired “martial arts tournament” premise to get its performers in the ring.  It mixes the prison tournament’s corruption with a dash of The Defiant Ones to provide some kind of narrative throughline, but its lead performers lack the ability to convey any sense of nuance or humanity.  And those zooms – oy!  I get it!  These are hard men!  Now, move along!

Nevertheless, Undisputed III: Redemption has those fights going for it.  And it’s here, in the ring, where the film excels.  With one glaring exception, the makers of this film cast gifted physical performers.  These men leap, spin, kick, and fall like men on wires, and the fact that there’s nothing between them and the mat but air makes their work all the more impressive.  Director Isaac Florentine understands this, and trusts his performers, coordinators, and choreographers enough to go with long takes that makes it possible for the audience to actually see the rhythm of a given fight, to enjoy the acrobatic skill of the performers, and to admire the clockwork displays that can only come from days and days of careful practice and preparation.  Sure, the film has one notable exception to this: one Mykel Shannon Jenkins, who plays the token American.  Jenkins isn’t a fighter or an acrobat: he’s just a guy in really great shape.  This means that during his fights, the rhythm of the film has to change to one dominated by creative editing.  It pulls us out of the proceedings and drags the film down, but what are you gonna do?

So, there it is: Undisputed III: Redemption, while not a great film, provides phenomenal fight scenes and the chance to see some real pros do some great work.  If you like the genre, you’ll like this film.