The Girl Who Played with Fire

This year hasn't been as big a movie year for us. NO big blockbusters angling for our dollars. Nothing we'd go out of our way to see or that couldn't wait until DVD. (Though I do want to see Inception on the big screen.) When either of us suggests going to see a film, we hem and haw, and eventually give up and watch TV. With that said, we did manage to agree on a film and dragged ourselves from the apartment to see The Girl Who Played with Fire on Saturday.

the Girl Who Played with Fire takes place a year after Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander uncovered the truth about the disappearance of Harriet Vagner. Lisbeth has been in hiding with her newly found wealth, but decides that she needs to return home, back to her former life in Stockholm.As she unpacks and slowly begins to reconnect with the few people she considers friends, she finds herself being hunted by the police, implicated in three murders that all link to her in some way. The first two -- a reporter for the magazine and his girlfriend -- were working on a story involving sex trafficking that they had planned on publishing in Millennium magazine, currently the home magazine of Mikael Blomkvist. The other murder involved her abusive guardian Nils Bjurman. Lisbeth sets out to clear her name and to find out the identity of the mysterious Zala, finally asking help from the one person she truly trusts, Blomkvist. But are they both ready for the truths about both the murders and Lisbeth's past that they may uncover?

A good film, perhaps a bit slower paced than the first movie in the trilogy. I think many second films are like that, slower so as to establish more of the story and to set up the third part. We learn much more of Lisbeth's background, especially about her father and how she came to be under the government's protection, and the movie ends with more questions being asked and only a very few being answered.

Noomi Rapace (Lisbeth) and Michael Nyqvist (Mikael) were great, as they were in the first film. Lisbeth is such a dark character, and Rapace portrays her with such ease that whoever is chosen to play her in the English-language remake has some tough shoes to fill.

The only real drawback for me was the subtitles. Once again, they used dull white letters which at times disappeared into the film so that I couldn't follow certain scenes. It didn't ruin the story, but it was a bit frustrating.

Image from IMP Awards.