How remote is Sweden? Judging from “The Girl Who Played With Fire” and its predecessor chick revenge fantasy “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” it’s so far off the map that no one there has heard of Austin Powers.
Dr. Evil pretty much gave away the game for hack mystery writers who rely on villains delivering long-winded explanations of their dastardly plots while heroes sneak up behind them, or who leave their quarry not quite dead in easily escapable peril. These guys are evil geniuses yet can’t be bothered to check their victims’ pulses before they walk away?
The second Swedish movie (Hollywood will soon try its hand at the same material) in the “Millennium” trilogy of mysteries adapted from the Stieg Larsson best sellers finds dragon-tattooed young hero Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) back in Stockholm. This time she’s working with her sometime lover, middle-aged investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) at a distance, as Salander is suspected in three murders.
Her rapist and parole officer, against whom she exacted her revenge in the first movie, is trying to track her down for some payback even as a hulking blond hit man hired by a mysterious figure called Zala searches for her.
For Lisbeth to be tied to the murders is a huge stretch — the real killers just happened to use a gun she had recently handled — and as in the first film the big twists are contrived revelations of sexual abuse and unlikely coincidences.
Almost without exception, the men are either sickening deviants or wise mentors while the ladies tend to be kickboxing hipsters or victims of sexual abuse (many are both).
There is some satisfaction to be had in a step-by-step mystery being competently executed — but such plots are so cheap that they’ve mostly been demoted from the big screen to episodic television. This series, to be charitable, is aimed at the non-ironic mind-set, utterly self-serious as it lays out the mini-mysteries leading to a “big reveal.”
The formula isn’t enlivened by any spark (unlike “The Silence of the Lambs,” it doesn’t offer an unusually compelling bad guy or psychological depth). It doesn’t even have any special Swedish flavor and could just as easily take place in London or San Francisco. Dialogue is strictly functional, with no attempt at repartee (“Sit there or I’ll shoot you like a dog,” etc.).
So what earned these stories their pride of place — six movies coming and copies of the books stacked high next to the Tic Tacs at the airport bookshop? Two reasons.
One is what I call (after a T-shirt slogan of the ’80s) the Nuke a Gay Whale for Christ brilliance of covering so many bases at once. Lisbeth ticks every box on the checklist of what women readers believe to be cool. She has a huge tat, nose rings, a sullen disposition and tight black leather clothes. She smokes and she drives a motorcycle. She’s bisexual, she’s a genius hacker, and she’s a sex-abuse survivor who mercilessly avenges the seemingly inexhaustible population of Sweden’s Nazi pervs and monster creeps.
Second: The author of the books died before any of them were published. Sorry, but a dead hack is still a hack.