REVIEW: Girl Who Played with Fire Goes Through the Tiresome Swede-Goth Motions

The novels of the late Stieg Larsson are the little Saabs that could: These three posthumously published thrillers -- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest -- might have been nothing more than an entertaining genre-fiction exercise, the sort of thing that might, at best, achieve some sort of cult status. Instead, they've become the books that everyone and their grandmothers seem to be reading, and the Swedish movie based on the first book in the series, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, directed by Niels Arden Oplev, became a surprise U.S. hit last year. Hollywood is, of course, preparing its own David Fincher-directed version, but those of us who are allegedly in the know are supposed to automatically prefer the Swedish version, with its dour approach to torture and violence and its efficient "He did it because he's crazy, that's why" wrap-up. Because the movie is long, colorless, uncompromising and, well, Swedish, it's got to be better than any future American version, right?

Well, no. And those who were as underwhelmed by The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as I was aren't likely to be won over by the second movie in the series, The Girl Who Played with Fire, this one directed by Daniel Alfredson. There's no grim investigation at the heart of this movie; instead, it's an elaborate cat-and-mouse game, one that opens with everyone's favorite inexpressive, milky-skinned, mighty-mite computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) packing up, purposefully, to leave some exotic island retreat. (Amazingly, she even has a tan.) It turns out there's some unfinished business back home involving her sicko former guardian (Peter Andersson). It will also turn out that she's being framed for the murder of two journalists who were about to break a big prostitution scandal, and her friend, admirer and sometime lover, magazine publisher Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), hopes to protect her -- not that she needs anyone's protection. Lisbeth, as we know from the first movie (as well as, of course, those ubiquitous books), is perfectly capable of taking care of herself, thank you very much. Which is why Alfredson, as Oplev did before him to an even greater degree, apparently has no problem showing us, in brutal detail, how many stomach punches, kicks and bullet wounds she (along with one other woman character) can take.

Of course, that "she can take it" ethos is part of the mythology of Larsson's books. He considered himself a feminist, a hater of woman-haters. (The Swedish title of the book that would eventually be published in America as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was Män som hatar kvinnor, or Men Who Hate Women.) But brutality is one thing on the page and another on the movie screen; and in the movies, it's how you show a woman being hit that matters.

The violence in The Girl Who Played with Fire is milder than that in the first movie; there's less psychosexual torture and more garden-variety action-movie kicking and punching. Still, it's bloody and bone-crunching, and the fact that we know Lisbeth is going to come back and kick some baddie's ass doesn't make it any more pleasant to watch. As Oplev did before him, Alfredson plays both sides of the fence here: Normally, a filmmaker would (or should) take some care in the way he chooses to show a woman being punched and beaten. But the subtext here is that because Lisbeth can take care of herself, it's OK to show the impact of every punch, to put every moan of pain on the soundtrack. It's not that Alfredson revels in Lisbeth's suffering; but he's not being honest about the gray area he's trawling, either.

Still, The Girl Who Played with Fire isn't complete torture to watch. As an actress, Rapace definitely has a poker-faced allure. I remember feeling unsure, at the start of Dragon Tattoo, about whether that face could possibly show a broad enough range of emotion to sustain a two-hour movie. I was pleasantly surprised at the time, and Rapace pulls off a similar near-miracle here. She may not be the smiley-est actress on the planet, but she does throw off plenty of understated punk-ass bravado.

Too bad, then, about the movie's tiresome story mechanics. The plot of The Girl Who Played with Fire takes the requisite number of semi-surprising twists and turns, which become less and less surprising as the plot trundles on. We learn more about Lisbeth's painful past, and certain shadowy figures from that past emerge in unlikely ways because, well, when do such figures ever emerge in likely ways? And some of the plot logic is unforgivably boneheaded. If a picture builds a compelling mood of drama and suspense, one or two minor implausibilities are completely acceptable. Maybe, in some alternate universe much further away than Sweden, it would make sense that a journalist could lure an extremely secretive source -- one with plenty of information he ought to be keeping under wraps -- out of hiding by sending him a letter announcing that he's won a free cell phone. But if that source is an intelligence operative?

I suppose the scenario is possible -- maybe every intelligence guy can use an extra cell phone or two -- but buying it involves a greater leap in logic than I, personally, am willing to make. (Your mileage may vary.) The Girl Who Played with Fire is suspenseful in a few places and absurd in plenty of others; if she were a real person, Lisbeth Salander herself would have no patience with it.