Flickan som lekte med elden
Director: Daniel Alfredson
Writer: Jonas Frykberg
Based on: Stieg Larsson‘s novel
Sequel to: Män som hatar kvinnor
Cast: Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre, Peter Andersson, Michalis Koutsogiannakis, Annika Hallin, Ralph Carlsson, Georgi Staykov, Micke Spreitz

Plot:
A few years after the events in “Män som hatar kvinnor”, Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace) returns to Sweden to remind her “guardian” Bjurman (Peter Andersson) of their deal. In the meantime, Mikael (Michael Nyqvist) is investigating a sex trafficking ring together with his young colleague. But when said colleague, his girlfriend and Bjurman are found dead and Lisbeth is accused of all three murders, Mikael’s and Lisbeth’s paths cross again. While Lisbeth is on the run, they both work feverishly to find out what’s going on.

Flickan som lekte med elden suffers from the sequel sickness: while the desperate attempt to up the stakes leads to too much conspiracy, the movie struggles even more with the weaknesses of the first one, foremost the pacing.

There is no big difference in the production quality between the first film and this one but despite that, it is not as good a movie as the first one. The pacing was even more off than in the first one and in the middle I got so bored that I drifted off and lost about 10 minutes.

Unfortunately the plot is so convoluted that I actually was confused for a bit after that and even considered rewinding. But since the movie dragged already, I didn’t want to prolong it, so I decided against it.

There are still many good things about the film – foremost, as usual, Noomi Rapace who is just wonderful and brilliant.

In the end, it doesn’t feel like a natural sequel, but pretty tacked on. It wasn’t necessary to finish the story and I probably would have preferred it to have the ending of film number one.

Summarising: Pretty meh.