The Girl Who Played With Fire

Stieg Larsson would probably feel good about being the best-selling novelist in the world if it weren’t for the fact that he’s Swedish, and Swedes don’t like to show positive emotions, and also that he’s dead, and dead people don’t feel much of anything. In spite of that, his books have been turned into films, and the second one, The Girl Who Played With Fire, is a tight, taught thriller with exactly the kind of pacing you want from a murder-mystery. It’s slightly less-good than the previous one, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, because of a couple of silly plot points, but it’s still a text-book example of the form. Noomi Rapace reprises her role as irresponsible-yet-heroic computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, and Michael Nyqvist does the same as muckraking journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Having broken up in the last movie, they’re drawn back together by an unlikely series of events that ties Blomkvist’s magazine and Salander’s violent temperament together in a triple homicide. The film mostly well-played, and definitely very enjoyable—but could have been just three or four IQ points smarter.