The Girl Who Played With Fire (Daniel Alfredson) 2009

I really liked the first part of his series called The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  Most of the reviews leading up to this movie pretty much all say there is a dip in quality of the next two films, mostly having to do with the change of director.  Now, while I do agree there is a significant step down in quality, I am attributing it mostly to the story.  I’m gonna try not to spoil too much of the movie but hopefully explain why the story blows.

So we meet back up with Mikael (Michael Nyqvist) who hired on a new reporter who is going to blow the lid off of a sex trade industry.  The reporter, his wife, and Lisbeth’s kind of parole officer are murdered and the gun left at the scene has Lisbeth’s (Noomi Rapace) fingerprints on it.  Mikael then goes on a quest to find out who really murdered those people.

It is hard to really describe where the plot goes wrong without really going into details but I’ll try.  My problem is that the plot is now so freaking ridiculous that at the very least elicited chuckles from my audience and nearly had me scream “OH COME ON!!!” at the screen.  And I’ve already worn out my welcome doing that.  One more time and I’m trespassed from the Harkins.  You see when we meet Lisbeth we can tell she has a troubled past (both physical and mental abuse) but we never feel that she is an important person.  I mean, she is a talented hacker but it is not like the fate of the free world depends on her.  In the end, she is just a woman who tries to get by.  But in Girl Who Played With Fire well all of a sudden have to believe that this whole intricate plot has been laid out for her with twist after reality bending twist added on.  When we finally run into the mastermind and his freakish man-child who cannot feel pain I am wondering if I am seeing a Sweedish crime thriller or the next Bond villains. We get a big twist which is a cliché so overdone it ranks up there along with “It was all a dream…” as one of the most overdone twists in movies.  AND THEN WE GET THE SAME TWIST BUT WITH ANOTHER CHARACTER!!!  I mean, what the hell?  How can you re-use a cliché twist in the same movie?  And then yet another thing happens that I don’t even know how it happened.  It’s like even the writers forgot a character died or something and just kept rolling like that person was still alive.  This movie hurts my brain.

Another thing that hurts this movie are the lack of characters.  Now, I know we get a ton of back story on Lisbeth for example (too much) but stay with me.  Even though we get EXPLAINED a lot of the character’s back story, we don’t get any real interactions with the characters.  Part of what made the first movie enjoyable was the play between Lisbeth and Mikael and seeing how they cope with situations.  Here it seems like they spend most of the time trying to churn out all the exposition so that this movie will make sense.  That is probably where I can fault the director.

There is too much plot crammed into a confined space.  Alfredson seems to have no ability to craft a tense scene.  The first movie had plenty of quiet suspenseful moments where here it is more a cheesy action movie.  Here we have poorly choreographed martial arts fight scenes and gratuitous scenes where we put in some Lisbeth wank material.  I know, I am somehow complaining about nudity, but it’s that pointless.  The main actors do alright, but as I said, they are so hamstrung by the confines of the script you see very little actual flashes of character.  In fact, they make Lisbeth stare in awe so often I wondered if I was in a Spielberg movie.

I don’t like to write reviews this snarky but this movie got to me.  As I was sitting there you can just imagine a meter in my brain of my enthusiasm for this movie as it crept down and down from “Very Interested” to “Kinda Slow” to “Pretty Bad” to “Idiotic” to “Get me out of this damn theater”  By the end I was just sitting there out of obligation because I never walk out of a movie.  But I was done emotionally.  Wow.  Just wow.