Girl without dragon tattoo We can say that Denmark and Sweden are ruled by women – in the first country, the weaker sex is represented in at least ten positions of the current cabinet, and in the second, the beautiful lady is the main person in the state, and the percentage of women ministers is also one of the highest in the world. It is logical that such emancipation, which has taken place for many years, began to manifest itself in local cinema - all the most famous projects of the above-mentioned Scandinavian countries tell about strong women who do not need a man's shoulder to do their difficult and dangerous work. These heroines have become the hallmark of the cinema of their homeland - we all know who Lisbeth Salander is, but not everyone will be able to remember what Michael Blomkvist looks like, and TV series with ladies in the lead roles gave an outlet to Scandinavian television on the world stage - if someone did not see the "Bridge" or "Government", then about the famous "Murder" certainly heard. Local filmmakers quickly seized on the trick and began replicating stories about women in politics, journalism, and government, or better all at once. Only if even the masterfully made story of Sarah Lund, which combined drama, noir, and a smart, honest detective in relation to the viewer, in the second season has already lost a greater share of its positive qualities, then what can we say about the rough copier, picking up the popular trend, which is “Red Wolf”.
The film, based on the Swedish writer’s book of the same name, combines all the main elements of the above successful Scandinavian projects – brutal crime, a strong woman, journalism as the real fourth power and the only way to shed the truth on history, the police, the government, the left, the right, the military, politics, and even the problems in the relationship of the main character with the opposite sex. It would seem that so many important topics were raised, what else is needed? At least time. If we go back to comparisons, then all of the above products had a large number of series, or, in the case of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the timing was under three hours. "Red Wolf" fit into the standard movie time - economical hour and a half, which come to the end stop the story where it first begins interesting to watch. Danger, closeness to the truth, pain, questions, answers - all this hastily crumpled into a ridiculous ending that does not reveal the story dramatically, is not a surprise and acts according to the laws of the good old mainstream detective, the remoteness from which Scandinavian projects have earned their fame. Such a scale did not allow to reveal any potentially interesting element of the script, reducing the drama to superficial mentions of problems, and forcing authors to chew the entire politics of the story in a mini-lecture that belittles the mind of the viewer.
One of the most fascinating moments of a good neo-noir is when some thing that seems like a sophisticated ploy by an equally sophisticated psychopath, like a sinister warning, turns out to be much more prosaic and logical than you thought. In the "Red Wolf" such a thing is present and it is indicated even in the title of the picture - the creators honestly tried to give this sign a more practical meaning, forgetting that in this case their scheme becomes a house of cards, which will collapse with one breath of wind, or in this case the idea that one of the victims in this scheme is not included. But it's okay with psychopaths, for a good movie, they only benefit in certain doses. But there’s nothing in Red Wolf that turns stories of horrific murders into powerful dramas that tell not only about human tragedy, but also about how politics, journalism and police work with it, along the way revealing important issues for Denmark, Sweden and the world. Here we have a flat and dry detective, who tries to take the viewer a beautiful girl in the lead role, who hangs the label seeker-truth-no matter-what and dutifully follows him, occasionally making curts in the right direction, showing his “difficult fate of an honest journalist” and a deceived woman. Of course, it was possible to make something stronger out of Red Wolf, even in the conditions of an hour and a half television movie, but the creators of the film decided to go on a simpler path, relying entirely on the charming effect of the inscription “from the producer of the Millennium trilogy on the poster.”