On DVD: The Girl Who Played With Fire

The girl with the dragon tattoo is back in the second instalment of the Swedish crime trilogy and this time, she’s playing with fire. While Noomi Rapace’s performance is similarly red-hot, Emma Rowley finds the other elements of the film lukewarm at best.

The Girl Who Played With Fire should be the trilogy’s Empire Strikes Back, a bleak middle movie in which the good guys are routed, our hero (Salander) heads off solo to take on the forces of evil, and a climactic battle and revelation occur that leave her destroyed and the audience reeling. But in practice it doesn’t work out that way.

The story picks up a year or so after Salander rescues Blomkvist from Martin Vanger. She is living anonymously in the Caribbean on the cash she siphoned from Hans-Erik Wennerström’s account. But she's keeping a close watch on the appalling Nils Bjurman, her legal representative, thanks to the Asphyxia program that gives her remote access to his hard drive. When she sees that he's arranging an appointment to remove the tattoo she gave him (which reads, “I am a rapist and a sadistic pig”), she decides she should head back to Sweden to pay him a visit. Meanwhile, our old friend Blomkvist has been approached by a young investigative journalist manqué, Dag Svensson. His girlfriend Mia Johansson has investigated a sex trafficking ring for her doctoral thesis and Svensson wants to publish the resulting information in a special edition of Millennium. But things go very quickly awry, in the form of a triple homicide for which Salander is the police’s chief suspect.

The novel the film is based on is the weakest of the three books, and this adaptation – directed not by Niels Arden Oplev, who helmed the first, but by Daniel Alfredson, and intended for Swedish TV – is pedestrian and patchy enough to snuff out any interest in the trilogy outside of its hardcore fan base, which is luckily large enough to ensure it’ll turn a decent profit. The problem is that it doesn’t find an angle on the novel, opting instead for a lacklustre summary of its main events, in the process passing over much of what made the source material interesting (for example, the tabloids’ fascination with Salander’s love life and their re-invention of her as a key figure in a fabricated lesbian Satanic cult). And while the first film was framed as a self-aware detective story – complete with a locked-room mystery, a dynastic list of suspects, an unlikely detective duo and Agatha Christie-like clues such as the dried flowers that Henrik receives each year and Harriet’s coded Bible references – the second instalment suffers from the lack of a similarly unifying theme and seriously indigestible middle-segment plotting.

Characters are introduced so fleetingly that they are quite obviously included only to further the plot. They play their parts and are either killed off or returned to the shadows, like so many unmourned whack-a-moles. Lisbeth's on-off girlfriend Miriam Wu and boxer Paolo Roberto (who plays himself in the film) occupy some key scenes in the central section but are little more than ciphers. A sub-plot that sees them trapped in a barn by the inhumanly strong antagonist Ronald Niedermann (who comes off as a sub-Bond villain henchman), is ineffective, unlikely and comically bungled by a far-too-easy escape. Ordinarily, an adaptation might choose to excise or rewrite this plotline but the novels are far too well-loved in Sweden to allow such meddling.

The loose story threads that are being laid here will be pulled tight in the final part of the trilogy to reveal the scope of the conspiracy against Salander, but in the meantime, and with little attempt to make the audience engage emotionally with the onscreen events, there is just a lot of stuff happening to little purpose.

It is left to Noomi Rapace to salvage the proceedings with a charismatic performance, and every scene she’s in still crackles with intensity. There are some vintage moments: a fight against a pair of bikers who have no idea what they’re letting themselves in for; her characteristically violent method of information gathering, shown in the scene where she strings up one of the trafficked girls’ johns; and her fearless march into the enemy’s camp. But these high points are few and far between in the lengthy 129-minute running time. That’s not to suggest that the film is a disaster but rather that it’s a bit of a slog whenever Rapace’s Salanader is not on screen.

We’ll reserve judgment on the trilogy as a whole until the third film is released but given that it’s also directed by Alfredson, we can probably expect a similar tone and style. Though this reviewer is not keen on remakes in general and has been unenthusiastic about Fincher’s remake specifically, the American version will have one great advantage over the Swedish original and that’s its increased distance from the source material. On the other hand, it loses its great draw: Noomi Rapace. But since she is currently making waves and taking meetings in Hollywood, we can hopefully look forward to seeing more of her work soon.

You can also read our reviews of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest. 

Rating on a scale of five incriminating fingerprints on a handgun: 2.5

Release date: US = 9 July (limited); UK = 27 August 2010
Directed by: Daniel Alfredson
Screenplay by: Jonas Frykberg, Stieg Larsson
Cast: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Lena Endre, Yasmine Garbi, Peter Andersson, Georgi Staykov, Paolo Roberto
Rating: US = R; UK = 15
Running time: 129 minutes

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