Film Review | The Girl Who Played With Fire

Up until the last couple of years, I had always assumed Scandinavia’s greatest contribution to pop culture was Abba (and, to a lesser but no less striking extent, the world of corpse-painted, ‘satanic’ black metal).

Little did I know that, with the runaway success of the vampire coming-of-age story Let The Right One In, coupled with the equally stratospheric ‘Millenium trilogy’ of crime thriller novels by the late Stieg Larsson (The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest) and their equally successful film adaptations, the Swedes will have carved a considerable niche for themselves in the world of mainstream cinema.

Of course – and sadly enough – success appears to be measured, these days, by how willing Hollywood is to remake whatever property creates a buzz internationally. And true to form, Let The Right One In already got the Hollywood treatment, and The Social Network’s David Fincher will be helming a Daniel Craig/Rooney Mara starring take on Larsson’s trilogy pretty soon.

But let’s not get carried away by the kind of snobby Romanticism that instantly equates ‘foreign’ with ‘good’. Larsson’s stories are pulpy narratives laced with the angry social conscience of a journalist: no more, no less, and they deserve to be scrutinised as such.

And when it comes to this sequel, one gets the impression that Fincher might just do a better job at chiselling the drawn-out, pace-killing narrative into something that approaches the intensity of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Two young journalists working for the hard-nosed investigative magazine Millenium –  run by the intrepid Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and vindicated in the first film thanks to the efforts of the ever-resourceful but psychologically damaged Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) – are brutally murdered in their apartment while investigating a sex-trafficking operation between Eastern Europe and Sweden.

The police find Lisbeth’s prints on the murder weapon… but Mikael is unconvinced. As the case unravels to include key members of Swedish society, Mikael races against time to protect Lisbeth from what appear to be increasingly formidable enemies. Meanwhile, Lisbeth conducts some investigating of her own, and comes up with disturbing links to her past, and leads which grow more and more dangerous as she digs deeper.

The original was certainly something special: turning an able-but-rote international bestseller into a grisly, gripping piece of neo-noir cinema that more than gave Hollywood a run for its money and a memorable anti-heroine to come to grips with and (eventually) cherish.

The sequel, sadly, appears to be made with one dark purpose: undoing its predecessors’ success. Its plotting is rote, its pacing is more than slack and the drama veers into something sitting not quite comfortably between James Bond and Days of Our Lives.

Not that sensational elements would have been unwelcome: the original made it nature as an exploitation-heavy potboiler very clear, and I suspect a lot of us return to the saga for our fix of violent badassery, meted out by the aggro, paranoid and sexually ambiguous Lisbeth… brought to life with tetchy finesse thanks to the excellent Noomi Rapace (who has done well for herself: she’ll be appearing in the sequel to the Downey Sherlock Holmes hit come December).

And don’t get me wrong: we do get a healthy dose of Lisbeth – the film is, after all, an origin story of sorts – but the narrative is so dragged out (for no apparent purpose) that when the good bits do come, our excitement is already quashed out. The main problem being that director Daniel Alfredson appears to be operating under the mistaken assumption that long narrative pauses (and little else) are all that’s needed to create tension.

Maybe I’m just being unfair – were we enthralled by The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo because it was a fresh (and foreign) take on well-trodden Hollywood material, so much so that a sequel will automatically feel bland in comparison?

Whatever the case, the fact remains that the editing scissors could have been applied more rigorously because as it stands we are left with a severe case of an emperor with no clothes: Niqvist’s Blomqvist is shown up for being utterly charmless, with acting chops (and a pock-marked) face that do him little favours. In the first one, it was a relief to see him shown up, after all, as a mere secondary lead to the emerging Lisbeth but now, with the two taking up centre stage in parallel storylines, that dynamism is lost.

Let’s hope that the girl who played with fire kicks the hornet’s nest with more gusto.