The Girl Who Played with Fire

The sequel to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo shares the earlier film's convoluted plot and choppy feel, but it loses the appealing interaction between odd couple Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) and Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist). In The Girl Who Played with Fire, Salander is accused of murdering a couple who were investigating a sex trafficking ring. While the crimes aren't shown, there's no moral ambiguity at play here, and no room for doubt as to Salander's innocence, which might have made things more interesting. The first film, directed by Niel Arden Oplev, wasn't exactly propulsive, but the budding relationship between the angry punkette and the crusading reporter held our interest. In this second movie, helmed by Daniel Alfredson, Salander and Blomkvist barely see each other, and, though that development is explained to some degree in Stieg Larsson's exhaustive tome, the film pretty much presents it as a given. While the plot of the initial movie was a bit farfetched and elliptical, the sequel, despite its similarly grim and realistic tone, features cartoonish villains that would be more at home in a James Bond movie. Rapace and Nyqvist are talented actors, and their strong characters deserve better than this slow, scattershot crime drama.