The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009)

There's been a lot of hype about the upcoming American adaptation of Swedish author Stieg Larsson's international bestseller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The film is based on a bonafide literary phenomenon, set in an exotic location (Sweden), and sports an A-list director (David Fincher), a solid movie star (Daniel Craig), and -- now -- a mostly unknown actress (Rooney Mara) thrust into a virtuoso role that has become a feminist icon worldwide.

So -- as all the book's fans go apeshit, both pro and con, about what Fincher may or may not do with this material -- it's easy to forget that these movies have already been made. And been made pretty damn well, at that. The Swedish movie version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is already a major smash worldwide (with over $100 million in box office) and has received a ton of critical acclaim.

The sequel, The Girl Who Played with Fire has just been released in the U.S. and the final, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest will come out in the fall.

I liked The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo well enough, but nowhere near as much as I liked the book. The filmmakers did about as good a job as they could have condensing the massive story into a single film. It was gorgeously shot, well acted, and solidly directed. But it kept me at arm's length in a way that the novel didn't. Somehow I didn't quite connect to the characters the way I wanted to. The whole thing fell just a little bit flat to me.

The Girl Who Played With Fire is an even more ungainly book to try to turn into a film. It has a lot more action, sure, but it's all wrapped up in an absurdly convoluted plot with what seems to be an entire platoon of brand new characters to wrap your head around. Where Tattoo was at heart sort of a standard locked-room mystery, Fire spans all of Sweden and features about eight different storylines all bashing into each other like a massive game of bumper cars.

Don't get me wrong; I absolutely love the book for all its flaws. But I wasn't entirely clear how exactly it could make the jump to the big screen. I was pretty nervous about how it would work.

So it's with a sigh of relief that I can report that not only is Fire a much stronger film than its predecessor, but it's actually an improvement in many ways over the original novel.

The key to the success of both the novels and the films are the two leads: Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a crusading journalist and ladies' man (and obviously an idealized version of Larsson himself), and Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a brooding anarcho-punk computer hacker with the iron will of a Roman Centurian and the social skills of a bar napkin. Tattoo was about introducting these two opposites so that they could solve a twisted decades-old murder mystery and, eventually, fall into bed together. They make one of of the most compelling crime-fighting duos since Holmes and Watson, Fraser and Diefenbaker, and Simon and Simon.

Where Tattoo was about bringing Blomkvist and Salander together, Fire is about keeping them apart. Salander's on the run after falsely being accused of murder, and Blomkvist must desperately try to clear her name. Meanwhile, there's a bunch of stuff about sex trafficking, Russian double agents, a lecherous lawyer with a secret, a Swedish biker gang, cops being led down the wrong path, and -- at the center of everything -- a murderous blond giant who can't feel pain and who beats people to death with his bare hands.

Rapace is far prettier and much more voluptuous than Salander is described in the books, and in Tattoo that threw me a bit. Lisbeth is described at being so slight that she's often mistaken for a boy. Seeing the statuesque Rapace fill the role felt a bit like watching Angelina Jolie try to play Hermione or something. That took some getting used to.

Nyqvist looks more the role, but the first time around he just sort of disappeared for me. His Blomkvist in the first movie felt a bit like a sketch rather than a fully developed character, and the heat and eventual deep bond that develops between him and Salander just never quite rang true for me the way it did in the book. And without that bond, there's not much else to hang your hat on.

Fire features a different screenwriter and director (Jonas Frykberg and Daniel Alfredson), and I think they deserve credit for digging deeper and finding that heat that lives at the heart of these stories, which is even more impressive considering that in this film Blomkvist and Salander share a total of about two minutes of screen time together. Nyqvist finally seems to settle into the role, finding the complexities that exist in the books and pushing past Blomkvist's too-cool exterior to the troubled firebrand underneath. He captures both Blomkvist's unyielding sense of integrity as well as his at times alarming and even dangerous well of arrogance.

Rapace is the real revelation, however. She did a fine job in Tattoo, but I had a hard time getting past her beauty, and her makeup and wardrobe felt like a glamour photographer's interpretation of what an anarcho-punk computer hacker should look like. She's just as beautiful in Fire, but Alfredson wisely dresses her down for much of the movie, giving her a stringy mop of hair rather than the hipster coif from the first film, keeping the Goth makeup to a minimum, and generally clothing her in baggy T-shirts and sweatpants. This gives Rapace room to scratch past the surface of the character, cracking through Salander's snarling exterior and showing the aching vulnerability and the deep loneliness that lurks beneath. For the first time, I felt like I was actually watching the Lisbeth I had fallen in love with in the books.

And I have to say I was very pleased with the casting of German actor Mikael Spreitz as Niederman, the aforementioned murderous blond giant who it turns out is much more deeply connected to Salander than anyone could imagine (dah dah DUM!). Nierderman is an absolutely terrifying character in the book, but he could have easily become a cartoon in the film. Spreitz manages to capture not only Niederman's brute physicality, but his viciousness, his intelligence, and his oddly childlike vacantness as well, and all with a bare minimum of dialogue to work with. He turns in a truly towering (pun definitely intended) performance.

But about that lumbering plot?

Larsson wasn't really a master plotter. In Fire in particular, he relied way too heavily on coincidence and narrative convenience. Frykberg and Alfredson do a really stunning job of streamlining his unwieldy text and actually make some very noticeable improvements to the material. They trim the fat and restructure the story subtly so that it feels almost plausible. They establish the many side characters through action and behavior rather than exposition and backstory (until the end, when the backstory becomes crucial to the plot). It's a still a fairly ludicrous story, but at least this time you spend less time thinking about how ludicrous the story is.

Some fans are inevitably going to howl that the film merely skates over the surface of the material and offers a sort of Cliffs Notes version of what Larsson was trying to get at. The film is certainly far less concerned with the political and social commentary that compelled Larsson (an avowed leftist and anti-misogynist) to write the books in the first place. This is to the film's advantage, however, because Larsson's biggest weakness (aside from his at times lazy plotting) was his tendency to launch into eye-roll-inducing speeches to make his points. All that substance remains in the film, but Frykberg and Alfredson simply choose not to bash us over the head with it.

It's hard to know how, if you have only a passing knowledge of the books or the first film, you might respond to this movie. My dad saw both movies without reading the books, and he seemed to enjoy them quite a bit. But I have a feeling many people will be left somewhat cold without the foundation of the books to guide you through all the different characters and the serpentine plot. But I'd say give it a shot, and then go back and read the books for all the cool stuff you missed.