The Girl Who Played With Fire

The Girl Who Played With Fire is a good thriller, but because it was preceded by a great one, it left me disappointed. Continuing the adventures of Lisbeth Salander, the tattooed and pierced lesbian goth girl hacker from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Fire has neither the immediacy nor the complex murder mystery of the first film. It is complicated without being convoluted, which most American thrillers aren't, but instead of being a mystery about a 40 year murder, with a complicated family tree of suspects, and taking place on the very island where the murder happened, this film concerns the attempts of several journalists to bring about the downfall of a corporation by revealing the corruption of several of its board members. Not nearly as involving, even after the journalists start turning up dead, and Salander is blamed for their murders.

Noomi Rapace returns as Salander, and Michael Nygvist as her sometime lover, the journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Salander has spent the intervening year between films in exile on a tropical island, enjoying the wealth attained from her extortion exploits, but finds it necessary to return to Sweden when she discovers, through some clever hack work, that the man responsible for the journalists' murders is someone straight out of her own past.

The bad guy, covered in scar tissue and in need of a cane, comes off as a Bond villain, as does his henchman, a towering Aryan who, through a remarkable nerve defect, cannot feel pain. Uh-huh. So we get the requisite fight scene where one of the good guys, who happens to be a kickboxer, pummels the shit out of him, and he takes it like it's nothing. You know, just like the scene in From Russia With Love where the same thing happens to Robert Shaw, or the scene in Goldfinger where the same thing happens to Odd Job, or the scene in ... Well, you get the point. I've seen it a hundred times before, and it brought the movie down to a conventional level when it should have been excelling into uncharted territory.

I don't come to movies like this for the bad guys, I come for the detective work the protagonists go through to unearth the complexities of the mystery, and for how cleverly they solve it. Dragon Tattoo played like an Agatha Christie novel with a graphic sex rewrite. Fire does have a mystery, but it is dealt with fairly quickly, and is rather obvious, and once it is revealed who is who, and how they are tied to Salander, it becomes a routine thriller with this person in danger, or that person in need of being rescued. There are car chases, daring rescues, shoot-outs, people getting buried alive, and, of course, things catching on fire, but it wasn't riveting.

I like the characters, so it kept me interested, but if the third film is as conventional as this one, then this will prove to be an unexceptional franchise.