Past Sins Come Home

I’ve watched The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo multiple times. Between the 2009 and 2011 versions I’ve probably watched each at least twice per film (once when each came out, and again for this site), so I’ve become quite familiar with that story and its beats. It’s a very well plotted, tightly crafted thriller with an intriguing mystery. It hooks you in and keeps you guessing, dragging you along through the case as you come to know and enjoy the lead characters. It is, quite simply, an excellent way to start a franchise, and I can understand why people flocked to the Millennium series of novels after getting through this first story.

With that said, I do not think the sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire, is anywhere near as interesting as the first novel. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ends with our heroes apart, with Mikael Blomkvist rejoining Millennium while Lisbeth Salander goes off, globe-trotting around the world after embezzling a shit ton of money from a corrupt billionaire. It’s an ending that puts the heroes in a solid place, but doesn’t cut them off from rejoining each other for further mysteries, should any arise. And one does, although I would argue that it isn’t really a story worthy of either of the characters.

That’s because this second story makes a similar mistake to the first: it puts so much focus on Lisbeth Salander that it kind of forgets to be about anything else. In fact, this one is so deeply invested in the story of Lisbeth that you could basically say she’s the center of the whole novel, if not the whole world. It actually ruins the story that was getting built, once all the connections are in place. Don’t get me wrong, I like Lisbeth as a character, but once all the revelations come out in this second story, I was really sick of how much the story is in love with her.

Oh, and I guess I should note: I’m not going to avoid spoilers here. The movie is seventeen years old at this point, and the book it’s based on is close to twenty. The statute of limitations for spoilers on this topic has long since passed.

So this film picks up some months after the events of the first, with Lisbeth living out in the Bahamas. She keeps her eye on events back home, in Sweden, having access not only to Mikael’s laptop (which he seems blissfully unconcerned about) as well as the computer belonging to her (rapist) caretaker, Nils Erik Bjurman (Peter Andersson). After seeing that Bjurman has an appointment to have his tattoo removed, Lisbeth heads home, deciding to keep a closer eye on Bjurman, especially so she can threaten him (with his own gun) and ensure he doesn’t step out of line again.

Meanwhile, Mikael has been tipped off to a new story by an intern working at Millenium: that of human trafficking and the sex trade. Unfortunately for the intern (and his girlfriend), apparently they were too thorough, and too deep on the case, as someone decides to have them killed. They do this with Bjurman’s gun, which they also used to kill Bjurman, and because Lisbeth touched the gun (and didn’t wipe it down afterwards), her fingerprints are now associated with all three murders. Mikael, of course, doesn’t believe for a second that Lisbeth would do this (and we, naturally, know that she didn’t), but the police don’t know that. And somehow, this whole case actually ties into Lisbeth’s own past, and will bring her demons right to the forefront.

I won’t deny that the first half of the story was pretty good. While I thought it was pretty stupid that Lisbeth would threaten someone with a gun and then not have the foresight to wipe it down afterwards (or use gloves), a simple thing any intelligent person (which we’re led to believe Lisbeth is supposed to be) would do, I thought the general beats of the story worked. There’s a white slave trade going on, Mikael and his team get into it, and suddenly they’re working another case of men who hate women (which was the title of the first book, after all). That’s solid.

You throw the murder mystery on top, and things get spicy. That, plus Lisbeth getting sucked in because she’s prime suspect number one, and I was on board. It’s a perfect cat-and-mouse case where Lisbeth has to be on the run, working her hacker angle while Mikael hits the streets and tries to work the in-person angle. It’s not that different from their dynamic in the first story, and while that might feel formulaic, it’s a formula that works. This early in the series you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. In fact, sticking to the wheel for a sequel might have been a good idea.

Instead we get Lisbeth somehow living in an apartment under an assumed name and no one recognizes her or rats her out, while she just wanders freely, stalking bad guys on the streets and performing justice on her terms. Not only does this make absolutely no logical sense based on what we saw of the character before (she’ll act, but she prefers to stay behind the screens), it also makes Mikael almost entirely irrelevant to the story. He sets things up, and then comes to her rescue right at the end, and the rest of the time it’s Lisbeth presents the Lisbeth Show, starring Lisbeth.

And that doesn’t even get into the fact that the plot, somehow, becomes all about her when there was absolutely no reason for it to. The film twists itself into a knot to connect the head of the white slavery ring to Bjurman, and then it reveals that the head of the ring, Alexander Zalachenko (Georgi Staykov) is actually Lisbeth’s father. It would be one thing if the story were just Lisbeth’s daddy issues, but that’s not the setup. We have an unrelated case where an intern starts investigating white slavery, and then ends up dead, and then all of these other twists and turns are dropped on the story just to make it all about Lisbeth. It felt very forced and didn’t work for me at all.

It takes what was already a solid plot, one that could very easily have fit the bones of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and turns it into almost a parody of itself. The point at which the movie says, “and the bad guy is actually her father!” I checked out completely. It did nothing for the story, or the characters, because even Lisbeth hardly seemed to care about her dad. She set him on fire back when she was a child and then moved on. Connecting everything back to her was a needless complication that added nothing. All it did was say, once again, “Lisbeth is the center of the universe. Don’t we all love her?”

Yes, she’s a solid character, and I think she works well in certain contexts, especially when she teams up with Mikael and the two work cases together. They each have their strengths and weaknesses. The point of a duo is that each person supports the other. But this story makes it clear that everyone is in service of Lisbeth and the universe will bend back over itself just to make her even more special. I didn’t need that in this story because it was already interesting enough without all these extra twists.

The Girl Who Played With Fire is a film that just can’t help but overcomplicate itself. A story about two investigators working to take down a white slavery ring before those very slavers kill the heroes is already interesting enough. Author Stieg Larsson should have stopped there. This movie is faithful enough to keep the complications from the book largely the same (streamlining a few details bother otherwise adapting the story as is). And because of that, while the production of this film is just as solid as the first film, it feels so much less interesting. I’m not saying they could have changed things dramatically I just… don’t like the story, and it ruins the film as well.

I don’t know that this film really could have been saved for me. Is it as well made as the first? Yes. The actors are great, the production is solid, and it has the same steady hands guiding it (even as new director Daniel Alfredson takes the helm). But a bad story is a bad story, and for me, The Girl Who Played with Fire is a bad story. There’s just no getting around that.