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Millennium Part 2: The Girl Who Played with Fire is the sequel to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo/Men Who Hate Women and takes off a year after the events of the first movie. Lisbeth is still overseas but is busy with an apartment back in Sweden. Once she returns she hooks up with an old female friend with whom she quickly has sex with. A pretty visual scene which will probably be toned down in the American remake. Meanwhile journalist Blomkvist welcomes a new colleague at Millennium. He’s trying to uncover a sex trafficking ring where famous people are involved in, but he and his girlfriend are assassinated. Blomkvist takes up the case and will eventually be reunited with Lisbeth as she is accused of murdering three people who are also linked in this case.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a great movie and this one is a step down compared to that one. The way how Lisbeth becomes the center of the movie is forced, the inclusion of her father and his appearance is taken right out of a soap opera or a James Bond movie. That also goes for an enforcer of the criminals, who has one of those diseases you only hear about in Bond movies. In this case he has congenital analgesia which makes him unable to feel pain. I looked it up and this is actually a real disease, though you could also describe it as a gift I guess. But didn’t one nemesis of James Bond has this disease or something likewise also?
The realistic story in the first movie is replaced by something more cartoonish. Though the “hacking” Lisbeth did was never really convincing. All we ever see her do is typing “connect to -fill in- PC”. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work that way in real life, but I do like how she actually uses a real computer instead of one of those flashy custom user-interfaces movies normally use, with all the screen-filling alerts and such. Lisbeth herself seems less helpless than in the previous movie. There she was assautled and abused multiple times, this time she takes up a couple of bikers by herself. Not in a flashy Hollywood way but rather down to earth.
The movie is still pretty good and has a faster pace than the first movie, but also is somewhat less thrilling though there are enough exciting scenes here. They also toned down the explicit aspects compared to the previous movie. So this movie is certainly not for all the rape-fantasy-fetishists out there, unlike the previous one.
