REVIEW: Second 'Girl' installment doesn't quite catch fire like the first

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” the first film in the Millennium trilogy by the late, incandescently popular Swedish author Stieg Larsson, was a cross between the achingly forlorn films of Ingmar Bergman and another spine-chilling, suspenseful novel similarly adapted into a mesmerizing film, Thomas Harris’ “Silence of the Lambs.”

Bleached of color and at times hope, “Dragon Tattoo” unspooled its violent, sexual mystery slowly, allowing the audience to play detective in a story of perverted obsession, unrelenting persistence and exquisite revenge. The result was an enthralling, meticulously plotted, fully rendered narrative of exacting attention to detail that worked like psychological gangbusters. It also introduced the world to Lisbeth Salander, one of the most utterly unique female protagonists to ever grace the screen.

Regrettably, the second film in the trilogy, “The Girl Who Played with Fire,” is not nearly as good. What ultimately saves the film, however, is the quality time it allows us to spend with “the girl.”

Removed from the cold, rural landscapes of the first film and centered in urban Stockholm, “Fire” instantly loses much of the ambiance and atmosphere that so permeated the initial film. This time around, a reporter working with Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) on a story linking Eastern European sex trafficking with powerful members of Swedish society is assassinated, and the fingerprints found on the murder weapon belong to none other than Salander (Noomi Rapace).

As Salander and Blomkvist try to sleuth out the truth behind the shocking revelation, Salander will come face to face with the disfigured and sadistic dysfunction of her own family.

Daniel Alfredson is not nearly the director Niels Arden Oplev (“Dragon Tattoo”) was. His aesthetic, relying heavily on a gritty, digital look, a seesawing camera and inexplicably choppy editing is much less artful.

But he knows enough to get out of the way of screenwriter Jonas Frykberg’s script and give the marvelously, almost impossibly three-dimensional Lisbeth Salander room to breathe and stretch her legs. Extremely intelligent but profoundly asocial, the Goth Salander’s personality is wonderfully deepened with the new material. This outing, we delve into her tortured past and see the cruel forge on which she was created.

“You’re invincible,” a character tells her early in the film. We know it’s not true. We’ve already seen Salander at her most humiliated, degraded and vulnerable.

But barbed both physically and emotionally, she certainly plays the part well. By the end, we will know just how mortal she really is, though it is a revelation that occurs simultaneously with her transformation into a wraith, a sort of avenging archangel of death, in which she enacts vengeance for all women injured by men.

As in the first film, the end of “Fire” is somewhat anti-climactic. It specifically concludes as a cliffhanger, intentionally leaving the fate of one of its main characters unresolved.

It is this ambiguity and lack of narrative closure that will ensure you are the first in line for tickets to the upcoming final installment in the trilogy, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” but it also means you leave the second film exasperatingly unfulfilled.

Like so many second films in trilogies, “Fire” it exists not so much for its own sake, but as the set-up for what is to come.

THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE

Cast: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Alexandra Eisenstein, Lena Endre, Georgi Staykov, Sofia Ledarp, Peter Andersson

Director: Daniel Alfredson

Theaters: Kimball’s

Rated: R (for brutal violence including a rape, some strong sexual content, nudity and language)

Running Time: 2 hours, 9 minutes

GRADE: B