The Girl Who Played With Fire

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Good news/bad news time. The good news is The Girl Who Played With Fire, the follow up to the much anticipated but disappointing The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, is superior to its predecessor. The story is tightened, the acting is better and there's a certain confidence to the proceedings. The bad news is that the ending is far too fantastic, belittling the realism that was the build up.

It's a year on from the events in ...Dragon Tattoo: Lisbeth Salander (Rapace) might be living in a beautiful mansion somewhere in the Caribbean but she's still haunted by her rape at the hands of her evil lawyer/PO Bjurman (Anderson). She returns to Sweden and finds herself fingered for three murders: Bjurman's body is found in his apartment and an intern for Millennium magazine, under the mentorship of famed investigative reporter Blomkvist (Nyqvist), has been shot execution style along with his girlfriend. Salander goes to ground, snooping out information to prove her innocence, while Blomkvist tries to convince the police they're after the wrong person.

Maybe it's the introduction of new director Daniel Alfredson and writer Jonas Frykberg (taking over from previous helmer Niels Arden Opley and writers Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg) but there's definitely a marked improvement going on here. The Girl Who Played With Fire doesn't suffer from 'sequelitis' (an admittedly terrible movie term we're claiming to have coined); the second movie in a proposed trilogy is usually a bridging movie - nothing solved, nothing gained - until the final denouement. No such problems here. The story is streamlined - a respectable 129 minutes works better than the meandering 152 that was Dragon Tattoo - but that doesn't stop Alfredson from including more of Lisbeth's back-story.

It isn't without its problems, though, as smart characters can do some terribly stupid things: Lisbeth is too clever to snoop around an occupied house in the middle of the night wearing a creaky leather jacket with rings jangling off it; when she finds documents she's been searching ages for in the outside wall of a country house, she returns inside the house to read them... There are too many plot-convenient chances like this taken. Bad guy Ronald Niedermann (Spreitz) may boast a looming threat, but his inability to feel pain renders him a second rate Bond villain. The ending too plays fast and loose with realism.

But if Alfredson can build on what he has done here (he's already directed The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest, due for release here in November) Stieg Larrson's trilogy can be saved.