Fans of feisty female hacker Lisbeth Salander will be pleased to know that she's back, kicking ass and taking names.
Salander (the perfectly cast Noomi Rapace) is at the centre of the story in The Girl Who Played With Fire, Part 2 of the bestselling novel series written by late journalist Stieg Larsson. In the first tale, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Salander and disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist together solve a 40-year-old murder mystery, but not without putting themselves in extreme danger.
In this installment, the two work on parallel issues and barely meet.
At the start of The Girl Who Played With Fire, Salander has returned to Eden after a year of self-imposed exile. What we know about Salander is that she is a badly damaged person, an anti-social computer genius still recovering from some hideous childhood events. Having been institutionalized as an adolescent, she has nightmares about her current guardian, the lawyer Nils Bjurman (Peter Andersson). Bjurman is yet another in a long line of men hoping to abuse the diminutive Salander, but she quickly sets him straight.
After a year away, Salander is dismayed to find out that her path and Bjurman's must still cross. She's soon back in his apartment, threatening him.
Her old colleague Blomkvist, meanwhile, is overseeing a special Millennium magazine report on the trafficking of Eastern European prostitutes. His researchers have come up with a list of men in high places -- cops, judges, politicians -- who have accepted sexual favours from this sex trafficking ring, and it looks as if this issue of Millennium will cause a lot of heads to roll.
Then a series of murders changes everything. Evidence links Salander to the crimes, and Blomkvist has to undertake an investigation into the killings to try to clear her name. One person links all the players in this story, a shady character who connects all the dots between abused prostitutes and Salander's world. Discovering who he is will free her at last, provided the experience doesn't kill her.
The Girl Who Played With Fire is a crime thriller marked by the same understated presentation of violence you saw in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Various matter-of-fact scenes have characters shot dead at close range, punching each other to a pulp or locked into burning buildings to die; nothing you see or hear is particularly emphasized, an approach that makes it all that much creepier.
People do play with fire, literally, in this sequel. It's another edge-of-your-seat thriller, populated by giants and misfits, and it's still frankly riveting to watch the endlessly inventive and self-sufficient Salander. Again, audiences here benefit from watching a Swedish cast that has no personal baggage for North American viewers, always a boost for the willing suspension of disbelief.
The Girl Who Played With Fire has the same problem that the first movie did, which is that the novels are rich in event and character, and there's far too much material to squeeze into a film. Those who haven't read the novels may find the movies a bit jumpy, but they are still very much worth seeing.
The Girl Who Played With Fire is in Swedish, with English subtitles. English-language film versions of the novels will eventually be released starting in 2012, but who can wait that long?
