The Girl Who Played With Fire continues the story of Lisbeth Salander that started in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The film functions on its own as a murder mystery thriller but the trajectory of the major and minor characters flows better if one has retained the feeling that made the first film a quality event. TGWPWF plots the course for Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy to bring the lives of the main two figures, Salander and journalist Mikael Blomkvist, to a full circle while also tying loose ends of sub plots.

As this second of three Swedish films ends on a cliffhanger the anticipation for the last of the series must rank as a kind of thinking person’s (perhaps a bit macabre considering the subject material) Twilight Saga. There’s already pre-production on a Hollywood version of the novels although one of the main attractions is the unglamorous lifestyle of these protagonists. At one point in TGWPWF Salander’s referred to as being five-foot and 89 pounds, which is admittedly slightly scrawnier than actress Noomi Rapace actually looks. It just seems redundant to remake what’s already an excellent film (series) yet Hollywood already has remade Let The Right One In and will release that film later this year under the title Let Me In, so it’s all fair game. Just let them find an actress like Rapace though, one who embodies Salander’s bi-polar bisexual internet hacking self.

TGWPWF starts out with magazine editor Blomkvist championing a young investigative reporter who’s penned an expose involving human trafficking. But when the writer is killed it leads investigators to another dead body (another character from the first film), and implicates Salander as the murderer. The film follows the different paths of Blomkvist and Salander as they each try to clear her name. One particularly interesting new character has a medical condition that prevents him from feeling pain, kind of like a Bond villain. You won’t think this is a better film than the first but you’ll see how it fits missing pieces of a puzzle perfectly into place.

- Michael Bergeron