The Girl Who Played WIth Fire Review
By David Kempler
This Girl Is Hot Stuff
She's baaaaaaaack. The girl with the dragon tattoo is now playing with fire in the second movie version of Stieg Larsson's novels, entitled the Millenium Trilogy. "
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" was a decent film that featured a great performance by the title character, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace). "The Girl Who Played With Fire" is a notch better because it is more focused and not dependent on a premise that has been played to death.
This time, Rapace is front and center as the solo star, and she is great once again. The petite, violent, tattooed, bisexual computer-hacker, with an anger management problem, is like a little typhoon of trouble. Everyone who gets in her path is pretty much guaranteed to be unhappy that they veered into her life force.
Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nykvist) is back again as the publisher of
Millennium magazine. He shared the spotlight with Lisbeth in the first part of the trilogy, but he is definitely second-fiddle this time, and that's a good thing. Not that his character was uninteresting, it's just that this is The Lisbeth Show.
Corruption is everywhere again and
Millenium is involved in getting to the root of the bad guys. But Mikael is relegated to bystander as Lisbeth goes after the evil people by her lonesome. Once again, Lisbeth is peeking at the computers of
Millenium and when she finds out that they are working on a story about sex trafficking, she goes ballistic. Lisbeth doesn't like sex trafficking. Murders start occurring and Lisbeth is the primary suspect in the rest of the press. What choice does she have but to go out on her own to capture the evildoers and exonerate herself?
Some requisite twists and turns follow as she gets closer to the truth, and wouldn't you know it? It all ends up hitting close to home for our heroine. It's all sort of comic-booky, but Lisbeth is such a fun lady to watch. Her looks are piercing. She is devious to the max. No one is more ruthless. Despite it being a tad bubble-gummy, it's a lot of fun and makes me curious what happens in the next installment, especially to a very large blonde gentlemen who is built like a truck. Stay tuned.
