If the overheated, overlong, and generally braindead potboiler “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” was the Swedish answer to “The Da Vinci Code,” then the second in the series, Daniel Alfredson’s “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” is a lot like “Angels and Demons.” Which is to say, yes, it’s more tolerable in a way, thanks to a fresher approach that streamlines the mock-seriousness of the enterprise in favor of innocuous cheap thrills. It’s faster, sleeker and a lot more enjoyable than its predecessor, but mostly just a less offensive waste of time.
If you’re just joining the “story” in progress, our narrative follows the separate paths of superjournalist Mikael Blomkvist and superhacker Lisbeth Salander. Blomkvist, head of the industrious Millennium magazine (a combination of the New York Times, The Economist and All-Telling Journalist Bible), is prepared to go wide with an expose revealing an underground sex ring and their powerful clients when the contributing reporters are murdered. Worse still, the murder weapon carries the mark of Blomkvist’s one-time collaborator Salander.
Blomkvist, somehow trusting that Salander is the innocent party, begins an under-the-radar, budget-less search for the glamorous, androgynous goth centerpiece of the films. At the close of the last film, Salander had finally purchased her freedom through blackmail and thinly-veiled methods of prostitution, but her past misdeeds have returned to haunt her. Seems as if the interminable rape sequences in the first film, when she then returned the favor by humiliating and degrading her attacker, have become relevant, making her a revenge target. And the scheme to implicate her reaches so far up that it finally establishes this film trilogy as a satisfied genre exercise, and not the dead serious rumination on mankind the original film wanted to be.
“The Girl Who Played With Fire” establishes the series’ pessimistic ongoing thesis: society is controlled by powerful men who only seek to oppress and exploit women, and no passage of time or changing of the guards will change that. Salander is a product of a broken home turned ward of the state, who raged against the patriarchy at a young age. As a result, she was passed from organization to organization, all run by men who found in her a damaged, unreliable hole to be violated and discarded. The film’s conceit is that she’s channeled that abuse into an obsessive, detail-oriented lifestyle involving a total mastery of cyberspace and found a way to pervert and commandeer some of these organizations by exposing the hypocrisies of modern culture. And also, that there’s nothing wrong with a completely irrelevant nude sex scene with her ample-breasted wayward lesbian lover. This could be a subversion of how the male character in these types of movies always has plotless dalliances with “the girl,” but the cheesecake factor in this candlelit romp is undeniable.
Fortunately, the sexuality in this film has been toned down from the original, which favored multiple rape sequences as well as a questionable moment when Salander takes Blomkvist to bed after serving primarily as his laptop-toting sidekick. Though the story involves a sex trafficking ring, director Daniel Alfredson (brother of Tomas) isn’t reduced to cheap footage of dirt-covered immigrants forced into sex acts with buttoned-down, bottom-nude cigar-smoking businessmen, which would be more in line with the vision of the first film’s helmsman Niels Arden Oplev. Here, Alfredson shies away from the gloomy, depressed vision of the first film in favor of loose-limbed suspense pieces. When Blomkvist (as incidental to the main plot as Robert “Look, behind you!” Langdon is to the “Da Vinci Code” films) suspects a thug of being a villainous henchman, he enlists a world-class kickboxer to engage the bruiser in battle. Is it a surprise when this battle happens in a burning barn where we learn that the burly criminal has no nerve endings and does not feel pain? If Daniel Craig stars in the remake, Bond flashbacks would not be inappropriate.
The big action climax, which seems to borrow from a zombie movie, dials the implausibility up to eleven, and for what gain, exactly? “The Girl Who Played With Fire” repeatedly announces itself as a silly genre diversion, but it doesn’t find the middle-ground needed as a proper response from the first film. Considering the sex ring storyline, you don’t necessarily want to shove such exploitative content into a conventional action thriller, but there’s a serious disconnect when a plotline involving an international prostitution ring keeps the real victims offscreen in favor of a detective story centered on one woman’s personal revenge tale, and an intrepid upper-class reporter more interested in implicating the guilty parties than actually saving a life or two. Still, it’s probably an upgrade that the shoot-em-up ending of “The Girl Who Played With Fire” closes not with the first film’s “Oh, not this” in favor of “Agh, why bother?” [C-]