The Girl Who Played With Fire

City Paper Grade: B

by Cindy Fuchs

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Published: Jul 7, 2010

 

 

LOCKED AND LOADED: Noomi Rapace kicks ass and takes names as Stieg Larsson's complicated heroine, Lisbeth Salander.

 

[ CITY PAPER GRADE: B ]

Lisbeth is having nightmares. She's spent a year traveling to faraway places (Australia, the Caribbean) and still, she's haunted. She makes the only decision you'd expect from a tech-gothy whiz kid with a photographic memory: She heads back to Sweden to sort out her demons — and kick their asses, too. As in the first film based on Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace) is agonizingly efficient, fixated and alone, which doesn't make her as self-absorbed as the men who usually play this archetypal role. She does her best to avoid contact with Mikael (Michael Nyqvist), the investigative journalist with whom she teamed on the series' previous mystery. Still, he's keeping track of her; Lisbeth is framed for a few murders, one involving the same so-odious legal guardian, Nils Bjurman (Peter Andersson), who is only the latest of Lisbeth's layered traumas. You don't need to know the specifics to appreciate Lisbeth now — she's as potent a cipher as any franchise hero: as resourceful as Bourne, as lethal as Bond. What makes Lisbeth resonate is that she combines these conventionalities with complications male counterparts could never fully manage: She gets herself, she knows how she looks to others and she's willing to suffer consequences because she knows she can. The consequences in The Girl Who Played With Fire are dire and (tediously) familial. She and Mikael are both trying to solve the murders related to a sex-trafficking ring, which means they're working in parallel, tracking down Johns and corrupt government agents. Encounters with the film's striking villain (Mikael Spreitz), a huge blond hulk who literally feels no pain, makes for some too-standard action scenes: a car chase down a sidewalk, a punch-out involving crane shots and frantic close-ups, and a showdown that leaves our girl so undone that her resurrection seems biblical. For all the abuse, she's less frantic and damaged this time, and thus, she's more fascinating.