I Watched This: The Girl Who Played with Fire

There's this scene in The Girl Who Played with Fire where our protagonist Blomkvist watches a video tape of a r@pe that took place in the first movie, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Refresher: its Lisbeth Salander's hidden video gone really wrong, an extended SLP of her getting very violated by her parole officer. Hard shit, this pretty, lithe girl mounted by a pink and hairless mass of a man (reminded me of this Louis CK joke where he said he only has sex with his shirt on because he doesn’t want to inflict himself on anyone). There's the almost suffocating midnight silence. Yup, it's a small room and there's no one around to hear the screaming. There's no way the film works on our sense of smell, but it feels like it does. The whole first half of Dragon Tattoo built towards this. Nothing in Fire though matches that ferocity. As Blomkvist watches the clip it's as if this second movie is admitting it pales in comparison.

When we last left Lisbeth, she was living the high life in Jamaica, her bank account full of stolen cash. Blomkvist had cleared his name and was back doing his journalist thing. Now, his newest hire has just completed a piece on the local sex-trafficking racket. And since he implicates cops, politicians, and high ranking criminals, he gets got. Blomkvist naturally goes about finding the killer. But when all the evidence points to the just-returned Lisbeth, he's got to do double duty and clear her, too.

One of the joys of the first film, besides the aforementioned violence, was the chemistry between Blomkvist and Lisbeth. They didn't even need to be physically near each other; their online banter was often more than enough. It was intriguing to watch nihilistic/gothic Lisbeth and idealistic/white bread Blomkvist meet in the middle of the spectrum, him darkening, her lightening. In Fire, the back and forth is clipped. Though the actual plotlines are more casually proximate from the start, Lisbeth and Blomkvist are like parallel lines: going in the same direction but never touching. They rarely communicate and they share only a single scene.

Back to the violence. Call me a sadist but the violence made that movie. It was so other, the American R rating so misplaced. There was that mood of menace, like that wind before it starts raining. It made you feel almost sick before shit went down. There was an almost Lynchian conflation of propriety and deviance though more genre and less artful than Lynch.

The reason Lisbeth returns to Sweden is to keep her parole officer from removing the tattoo she gave him that read "I am a r@pist and a pig.” Yet another reference to that first film. He doesn't remove it, but the film almost erases the menace that the first movie built. The violence is tame and unaffective. In one scene, Lisbeth takes out a couple of bikers, not with a dild0 and tattoo needle but with a can of mace and a stun gun. Are there any weapons that would be tamer on-screen?

A lot of stories have the most problems in their middle. There's often sacrifices for story bridging and character backstory. A good middle though makes me anticipate the final act. This movie doesn't do that. I lost a little steam, frankly. Good thing Blomkvist and Lisbeth are intriguing, visually and otherwise. I'll follow them to their ends. Hopefully, though, kicking a hornet’s nest is more dangerous than playing with fire.