My Writings
Review - The Girl Who Played With Fire
Steig Larsson's trilogy has become such a huge international best seller the books remind us of other famous Swedish exports Stefen Edberg, Abba and Volvo. Sales have been absolutely phenomenal. Larsson is predicted to become the biggest selling translated writer of fiction ever. Some effort when you consider he has only two main characters in his repertoire - repressed hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) and Millennium Publishing's investigative reporter Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist).
The first instalment, 'The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo', was an astonishing experience, helped by the
self contained nature of the story and by being introduced to such
interesting characters. The problem with The Girl Who Played With Fire
is that the story is not self contained and we are expecting too much
from our experience, second time around.
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It dips
into the previous
story occasionally, but only as a point of reference, to
the extent that if you see this movie without seeing the prequel, you
really are going to struggle to understand the motivation of the central characters.
What's worse is that Larsson has in fact written two stories, not
three. This film, and its sequel
'The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet Nest' are two halves of the same
tale. The producers simply omitted the dreaded words from this movie's
final scene... 'To Be Continued'.
As a stand alone piece, there are far too many
holes in the story. The super worldly-wise Salander is flushed out of hiding
far too easily, whilst both Salander, her lover Miriam Wu (Yasmine
Garbi) and Blomqvist survive so many encounters at the mercy of
Bond-type Villain Neidermann that it stretches credibility to breaking
point.
At one point Salander deals with a couple of hell's angels, and the movie
looks like it will finally take off. We settle down to immerse
ourselves in the kind of storyline so brilliantly unveiled last time. Instead we are
just clumsily told who the mysterious Zala is and what his relationship is with
Lisbeth. This is completely at odds with the clever way that the
story develops in the first movie.
Perhaps the final two movies should be seen in
a double bill, but at
a total of a shade under 4.75 hours, that is unrealistic. It is
more likely that after all three films have been analysed, this second
movie will be seen as largely superfluous, and the conclusion may well
be that it could have been scrapped and reduced to a few key scenes
that introduce us to a more substantial second course.
My Rating : 5/10 Unfulfilling
Review written by John Franklin : September 2010
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