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The Girl Who Played With Fire

by ruthlmiller — 28 Jul 10 — Review 4

Rated: R16+ (Contains violence, sex, offensive language & content that may disturb)

Director: Daniel Alfredson Staring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Lena Endre, Yasmin Garbi, Johan Kylen

Last year, my friend Barb took me to see The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.  She failed to mention that the film would be in Swedish with subtitles and would be sickeningly violent.  Smart girl that Barb…  I would never have agreed to sit through it had I known.  However, I’m really glad I did.  The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, whist being brutal and confronting (and in Swedish), was also a gripping and thought-provoking murder mystery.

So a year later, I found myself watching The Girl Who Played With Fire – the second movie in the trilogy based on the best-selling novels by the late Steig Larsson.  Noomi Rapace reprises her role as the ass-kicking computer hacker Lisbeth Salander while Michael Nyqvist returns as investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist.

The story begins about a year after The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo ended.  Lisbeth has been living in luxury on a Caribbean island, and for some reason decides to abandon paradise and return to Sweden.  Blomkvist is now Executive Editor of Millenium Magazine.  He recruits a young journalist who has researched a story exposing a white slavery prostitution ring bringing unfortunate young women from Eastern Europe to Sweden.  There are a number of high-profile public figures implicated in this story, as clients.

When the young journalist and his girlfriend are killed, the evidence points to Lisbeth as the murderer.  Things look even worse, when Lisbeth’s  court-appointed guardian (a sadistic rapist who she took outrageous revenge upon in the first film) is found brutally murdered in his apartment.

Lisbeth and Blomkvist work separately to clear her name, and in the process expose more of Lisbeth’s tragic history, and ugly family secrets.

Like most middle installments of trilogies, The Girl Who Played With Fire focusses on whetting our appetite for the denouement in the final film, rather than on the events of this story.   There is less action and less character development in this film than in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.  Lisbeth and Blomkvist do not come face to face until the very end, and the film suffers as a result of not having their extraordinary chemistry in it.  In fact, there is really not quite enough of the hard-ass Lisbeth or the intelligent, sensitive Blomkvist in this film, and it does drag a little, leaving us wondering how any of the plot will ever be resolved.

You’ll notice I have mentioned the first film in the trilogy a number of times in this review of the second film.  That’s because The Girl Who Played With Fire (the second installment) does not stand alone as a film.  If you’re going to see it, you need to see The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo first.  Conveniently, it appears to be showing in many theatres at the same time as its sequel, and has been released on DVD.

There is as much sickening violence and gritty sordidness in this installment as the first one, and there’s a lesbian love scene thrown in for good measure (my impression of Swedish people has been, well… expanded), but it lacks the heart of the first film.  There is talk of this trilogy being remade in English by a Hollywood studio, and I’m afraid that would rip the soul out of it also.

Despite not being quite as impressed with this film as I was with The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, it has built up my anticipation of the final installment due to be released in 2011 – so mission accomplished.

Rating: 3/5 Really a bridging film, bring on part 3.

The Girl Who Played With Fire4.051