The original Swedish film of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was no masterpiece, but it turned Noomi Rapace into an international star, and it gave its director, Niels Arden Oplev, the pick of every screenplay in Hollywood for his English-language debut. He\u2019s said that the script of Dead Man Down was by far the best of the 250 he read \u2013 so one can only imagine how dreary the other 249 were.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not that the screenplay is disastrous, exactly. It is what it is: an uninspired revenge yarn about an engineer (Colin Farrell), who infiltrates a low-rent criminal gang in New York two years after they murdered his wife and daughter and left him for dead. He\u2019s planning to torment and then kill their generically heartless leader (Terrence Howard), but when his neighbour (Rapace) spots him throttling one of the bad guys, she ropes him into a revenge plot of her own. The deal is that she won\u2019t shop him to the police as long as he dispatches the drunk driver who left her with a badly scarred face \u2013 although this being a mainstream film, it\u2019s not as badly scarred as everyone says.<\/p>\n
The story is pure pulp, from its twee romance to its preposterous action sequences, so it might have been worked up into a dynamic, sleazy, 90-minute B movie. But Oplev takes it seriously as only a Scandinavian can. He seems to think he\u2019s making a sombre drama examining New York\u2019s demi-monde, and the result is a silly, trashy thriller that\u2019s nonetheless drawn-out and miserable, with far too many shots of people sitting and frowning at each other.<\/p>\n
Most of the film\u2019s entertainment value, such as it is, comes from trying to figure out how Oplev and Co settled on the characters\u2019 ethnic backgrounds. Farrell, who\u2019s Irish, plays a recent immigrant from Hungary with an American accent, while Rapace, who\u2019s Swedish, plays a French woman who lives with her mother, Isabelle Huppert.