The Girl Who Played With Fire

Ratings: 6.5/10

Film Class: B

Genre: Crime, Thriller

The team duo is back again, computer hacker Lisbeth and journalist Mikael "teams" up yet again in this thriller after the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to uncover a sex-trafficking organisation. To complicate matters, Lisbeth is wrongfully accused for 3 murders she didn't commit...

This movie would make a bad stand-alone, independant movie because it doesn't really devote much screen time to character development despite it being a 2hr long movie. But I can't really demerit the movie because of that since it's "supposed" to be a sequel and the relationships between the characters should already have been laid out in the previous movie.

Still, because of that, it feels like it's a movie without head or tail... There were several re-enactment scenes but none too involving. They were like short trailers to piece up the major gaps in the current story plot. My advice, catch the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo before setting your eyes or spending your time catching this. That way you might be able to follow more closely with the storyline.

Just like its prequel, the movie is divided into 2 major parts, Lisbeth's life, and the main case to solve. However this time, it didn't work for me. They felt like extremely separated matters and the director somehow tried to forcefully link them together at the very end. Despite having a twist in the ending, it wasn't one worth applauding. Mediocre swedish film. Didn't feel much for the characters, didn't feel much for the plot, and didn't feel much for the movie.

There were several absurdities in the movie, *major spoilers ahead* like how Lisbeth "rose from the dead" and why the "robotic" villain didn't just kill Lisbeth's 2 friends straight away with the chainsaw lying on the ground but had to burn the place down. The fight scenes weren't too exciting cos of the lack of any soundtrack to go along with it and there wasn't much of a climax in the movie. Towards the end, the mood took a twist and it almost felt like a horror movie. Its not as good as its prequel, even though the prequel wasn't that fantastic in the 1st place.

Took me a while to piece together the rationale of the title, and though it was quite an intelligent use of pun, it wasn't enough to piece together this "broken" movie. Worth a miss.