The Girl Who Played With Fire

The Girl Who Played With Fire is the sequel to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a film I enjoyed very much.

Here journalist Mikael Blomkvist is still muck raking with his magazine Millennium but it has been a year since he has seen the intriguing, tattoo-laden Lisbeth Salander. The magazine takes on freelancer Dag Svensson who is putting the finishing touches on a blockbuster story about sex trafficking in Sweden that was inspired by his girlfriend's book on the same subject. Many big names are to be outed and Svensson is looking to contact those people for comment before the story runs.

For her part, Lisbeth is tidying up her finances and gets a new apartment. She keeps her old one as it serves as her legal address but rents it to her friend, Miriam Wu. Lisbeth also pays a visit to her sadistic former guardian, Bjurman. Brandishing Bjurman 's pistol, she warns him not to have the tattoo saying "I am a rapist and a sadistic pig" that she gave him removed. Bjurman later turns up dead as do Dag Svensson and his girlfriend. The guardian's pistol is left at Svensson's apartment with Lisbeth's fingerprints intact. The media kick up a frenzy as the police search for her.

Blomkvist refuses to believe that Lisbeth committed the murders and he sets out to prove her innocence. For her part, Lisbeth does not take things sitting down and she goes out into hiding and in search of the murderer as well. The former's investigation brings revelations of the past and of who exactly is behind the grisly murders. Lisbeth's adventures are just that. We witness the feisty heroine hack computers, take on her patricidal past, and, generally speaking, kick ass. But here are also lengthy scenes involving Lisbeth's friend, Paolo, a boxer and Miriam Wu. They confront a Nordic tank of a man – the Swedish equivalent of Jaws from the Bond films - who seems impervious to whatever they can throw at him.

While the mystery is intriguing and involves the familiar territory of Stieg Larsson who wrote the books upon which the films are based – misogyny, government corruption – the problem here is that Blomkvist and Lisbeth are separated for the vast majority of the movie. The chemistry between the two developed in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is absent here. I am left to presume that this situation is meant to prepare us for the following installment of the story in some way. But it leaves this, the second act, floundering a bit. It's still great fun to watch the badass Lisbeth take on the bad guys but Blomkvist withers. Towards the end there is a space in which it seemed like every other scene involved him receiving a phone call with new information. He is driving and his cell rings. Then we cut to Lisbeth closing in on the person behind it all. Then cut back to Blomkvist in his car answering his cell phone with an associate giving him yet more info. Rinse and repeat. It was a big disappointment to have him be spoon-fed all these revelations instead of watching as he and Lisbeth uncover them in a joint investigation as with the first story. It's the pairing of a straight-laced journalist and a tattooed, lesbian, misanthropic hacker that made The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo so memorable.

Despite this letdown, the film does attempt to round out the lead characters a bit, especially Lisbeth. Blomkvist is noble insofar as he seeks to speak truth to power, but he doesn't seem to have a problem sleeping with married women. Lisbeth also sleeps around. In fact, we get a fairly graphic sex scene. But, in addition to satiating her animal urges, we also see her visit Holger Palmgren, her old guardian, recovering from a stroke in an old folks home. Plus her past is brought up and a relative of hers is involved in the mystery. We see her being crafty and exact vengeance but we also witness her kindness and some vulnerability. The Lisbeth Salander character really matured here.

While it didn't quite live up to its predecessor, The Girl Who Played With Fire was still a fun movie and has whetted my appetite for its successor, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest which I imagine will be out this fall.