Girl with the dragon tattoo

Movie versions of best-selling books either succeed well enough (think of Harry Potter) or fail disastrously (try not to recall Captain Corelli's Mandolin). There's no middle ground as far as book lovers are concerned. For those whose loved Swedish thriller-writer Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy of feminism and violence, success depended on the casting of Lisbeth in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

The first of Larsson's best-selling books was an epic mystery in which a disgraced middle-aged investigative journalist and a young Goth-style female computer hacker join forces and detective skills to solve the 40-year-old mystery of a vanished rich girl.

The journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, a man of integrity and many affairs, is so well suited to Michael Nykvist, a veteran Swedish TV actor, that one could imagine Larsson writing the character for him. The crucial role of the very eccentric Lisbeth Salander went to Noomi Rapace, a TV actress and former punk rocker. The movie dialogue tells us Lisbeth is 24, but Rapace was almost 30 when the full trio of Larsson stories was filmed in 2009. She looks her age, self-possessed and mature, distracting me from the younger, edgier outcast I'd envisaged while reading. This movie Lisbeth looks stronger; credible, but less disturbing and surprising. She smokes cigarettes a lot too, which wasn't such a noticeable feature in the books of course.

The original book was hundreds of pages long, with an overlong introductory economic and socio-political framework for the many characters in the lives of Mikael, Lisbeth and the vicious Vanger family whose millionaire octogenarian head employs Mikael. In the book, there's an elaborate cover story for his detective work; the movie cuts that, along with many subsidiary characters and events.

Mikael's penchant for affairs is only hinted at. Lisbeth's sexual ambiguity is illustrated more clearly, as is her mastery of the Internet hacker's skills. It's tougher cinematically to present the evil natures of men who torture and kill, and their actors perform the tough tasks convincingly. Other cameo roles are also sharply drawn and well acted, and the settings - solemn Stockholm and isolated inland waterways - augment the overall mood of repressed anger.

Much to admire, little to fault in the direction by Denmark's Neils Arden Oplev. Another director worked with the same cast on the other two Millennium adaptations, and comparisons of style and technique will add interest to their signposted plots.