LITTLE ROCK — Sequels are always problematic, if only because the storyteller must keep two audiences in mind: those who’ve seen the first act, and those who are experiencing the characters and their relationships with one another for the first time. A filmmaker has to decide how much exposition is necessary, what needs to be restated and how much he can afford to gloss over without confusing the newbies.
These inherent difficulties might be compounded when the film in question is also the second part of a planned trilogy; traditionally the second part is a stem-winder that sets up the characters for the big finish. Part Two is often like a volleyball player’s set - it likely takes as much skill, but it’s nowhere near as dramatic as a spike.
So in many ways Daniel Alfredson’s Scandinavian noir The Girl Who Played With Fire is a typical middle piece - we can only meet Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) once - in that fans of the first movie Niels Arden Oplev’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo are likely to find it less enthralling thantheir first venture into Stieg Larsson’s alternative world. (Let’s acknowledge that the books that make up his Millennium trilogy are very popular and that I haven’t read any of them.) Still, it holds up on its own terms as an aggressive story of vigilante justice, with the damaged, tattooed hacker Lisbeth exacting her post-feminist revenge on men who hate women.
If it feels like formula, that’s because it is, but the lead characters - the slumpy Michael Nyqvist returns as the crusading newsmagazine editor Mikael Blomkvist - are compelling and (despite Lisbeth’s tendency to periodically behave like the gritty superheroine of a downand-dirty graphic novel) thoroughly believable types. And The Girl Who PlayedWith Fire is remarkably understated for what is essentially an action movie - the best part of the film is the natural way the characters (who, in typically European fashion, look less like movie stars than like your friends and neighbors) interact in the quieter moments, when people aren’t fighting or being brutalized.
The plot is simple in design, and epic in scale. Lisbeth returns to Stockholm after a year abroad, and is quickly framed for the murders of a young couple investigating the international slave trade and Bjurman (Peter Andersson), the legal guardian who unwisely abused her in the first film. Mikael, of course, believes Lisbeth is innocent, and sets out to prove it.
Like the first film, there is a lot of enjoyable art (and artiness) applied to what is essentially a pulp fiction. The villains are Bond-film cartoonish, and it was more fun to see Mikael and Lisbeth work together in the first movie than it is to watch them slowly converge in this one. But it’s refreshing to see a car chase that doesn’t result in the destruction of property. Bring on the final episode.
MovieStyle, Pages 40 on 09/17/2010