Family unfriendlyBy John DeSando, WCBE's "It's Movie Time," "Cinema Classics," and "On the Marquee"
If you want to see another dysfunctional family film without the usual zany humor, then see The Girl Who Played with Fire, the fiery sequel to the acclaimed Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and second in the three adaptations of the Swedish novel trilogy by Stieg Larsson. The family history of computer researcher Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace) lies under the thriller like an old rug reluctantly to be replaced because it has so much history.
By contrast with Tattoo, Fire is more action, blood, and coincidence and thereby not as interesting.
As Lisbeth and Mikael (Michael Nyqvist) once again team up to crack down on some very bad actors, this time sex traffickers rather than a powerful family (the family mayhem is saved for Lisbeth's), the heroes are together too little for my liking, and she is battered too much.
The flaws beyond adherence to Silence-of the Lambs cruelty and investigation are mostly in the sheer number of coincidences and abnormally good luck. As in the Silence of the Lambs family, a very tall and scary villain meat grinder cannot be stopped by normal means (in this film the Taser is the weapon of choice and ineffective when it counts the most).
In Fire, no small amount of effort goes into keeping things moving and scary but resulting in thin plot and script. Even repetition: the comeuppance of sex traffickers, especially johns, is graphically reprised from Tattoo, not as effectively given the shock of that first film as vengeance is in the hands of the sometimes fragile-seeming Lisbeth.
Although the film is rife with misogynist attitude, as was Tattoo, while it exults in the ingenuity of its heroine, I had just been satisfied with Christopher Nolan's Inception, a superior thriller and mind bender. The Girl Who Played with Fire has ample fire but not enough good old puzzle.
For summer, however, it is still a high-class thriller from Europe by way of American film noir.
John DeSando co-hosts WCBE 90.5's It's Movie Time, Cinema Classics, and On the Marquee, which can be heard streaming at http://publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/ppr/index.shtml and on demand at http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wcbe/arts.artsmain