Buckle up!

Ricky Gervaise. Not my cup of tea. Not even my pot of piss. Went to see him in Edinburgh a few years ago, where he was appearing doing stand-up in a show called ‘Science’. This has since become the benchmark against which all my other shite experiences that cost money and were profoundly unsatisfactory are measured against, replacing the previous benchmark of ‘My Crying Game Hooker Moment’. But, credit where credit is due, during one part of the show, just about at the point where it lurched from unfunny to unfunny and offensive, he used the term ‘buckle up’.

This has since passed into common…actually too common…usage in the household. Most recently it was used as the opening titles for the film ‘Girl with the dragon tattoo’ unfolded on the cinema screen.

Now, it’s probably fair to say given the popularity of the book that it was more likely that the audience for this film have read the book the film is based on than the audience viewing any other movie adaptation, apart maybe from the ‘Da Vinci Code’. But some, even most, does not mean all and looking round the theatre, there did seem to be rather a lot of ‘old dears’ in the audience.

I am not one to stereotype, I leave that to readers of the Daily Mail, but I’m guessing that if you were to ask a pensioner if they would like a trip to the cinema with their grown up children to watch a film which has been marketed as an intelligent thriller, they would say ‘yes please, and pass the Cadbury chocolate éclairs’. If, however, you asked them if they would like to come and see a film that has graphically depicted scenes of sexual violence towards women, they might choose something else to watch, or at least chew…my recommendation being a stiff sherry. By which I mean gin.

Anyone who has read the book knows about the violence, and you could sense the ‘buckle up’ moment coming as those who had read the book wondered how the scene would be dealt with. I was rather hoping for a ‘Reservoir Dogs’ style move the camera off scene, lots of horrible noises and let the audience supply the awful images in their imagination.

Nope. Instead it was full on awful.

What was odd was that the ‘revenge’ scene was just as brutal. Normally when some vile criminal gets his comeuppance, one punches the air. True, this is normally because it’s always fun to watch the Batmobile run somebody over, but also because the filmmaker understands that one goes to the cinema for entertainment, rather than trauma.

The argument for graphic depiction I suppose is that one should be unflinching in the depiction of the sort of vile act that makes the audience flinch. OK, but I think that if you are going to be graphic, you have to make sure it’s not gratuitous. The problem with the movie was that it wasn’t good enough to offset those scenes. If the rest of it had achieved the same intensity, then it would have been contextual, and for the shocked audience would have felt more consensual.

I’m not saying it was a bad movie. It’s not, it’s OK. It’s very uneven though, some actors have Swedish accents, others don’t bother. Daniel Craig is very good, and the other leads are good, the scenery is marvellous, even if it doesn’t look as good as the BBC or the Swedish ‘Wallander’.

Actually, there’s a lot of nastyness in the film, as there was in the book. As well as violence against women there’s murder, dysfunctional families, infidelity, catacide, torture and lashings of Nazis, and unrepentant Nazis at that. It’s just that it kind of gets buried under the on-screen brutality.

When the lights came up on a full house, everyone seemed fairly pleased with what they had seen. At least there appeared to be very little muffled sobbing. Maybe people do like to see adult themes tackled head on. I rather like to see Batmobiles tackle super-villains head-on and I know that’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

It’s a good film but, if you do go see…buckle up.