The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009)

(This is a re-posting of a Facebook note I did December of 2011.)

Once again, as was the case with my first little tirade about The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I should probably make it clear that none of the following is meant to offend anyone. Of course that is basically asking the impossible. The odd thing is that the things that I thought were going to be hot button issues turned out to be barely mentioned. In fact, in both my last note and talking with others IRL, as the kids say nowadays, people mostly agreed with me about the controversial stuff like rape. Imagine that! So I guess this time, I'll just mention that there will be more talk about rape, so prepare your fragile selves.
The sticking point, however, came when I talked about Stieg Larsson. Ah, Stieg. Good old Stieg. You were such a hack.
(You didn't see it, but about 100 million people just willed my head to explode)
People like him, though! And there are a lot of people who really liked the books. Then again, a lot of people also liked The Hanson Brothers. But to remind everyone once again, I'm not talking about the books, so we'll leave Stieg's writing out of it. That's really the only big problem I had with the guy anyways. I couldn't stand the way he wrote, which is purely a personal preference. Well, that and his stories and characters and their motivations...
Huh. I guess I do have some bones to pick, huh?
Honestly, I just found this story to be confusing as all holy hell. There was not one point in this film when I felt that I had a firm grasp on what was going on past the opening credits, when Lisbeth is having 'Nam flashbacks about being raped in the first movie. Naturally. It takes them 43 seconds to get to the rape. Joy.
But I digress. To the film's credit there really isn't THAT much rape in it. It does kind of begin to focus on other things besides that, which is a nice change of pace. Of course, it just can't help itself and there is a scene where two bikers find her snooping through a cabin and one of them OUT OF NOWHERE just looks at her and says to himself: "You and me, it's like we got a connection. I think I'm gonna rape you!"

A couple of you out there just got a big laugh from this.

Of course, it doesn't actually happen because Lisbeth hits him in the face with enough pepper spray to season a wooly mammoth and then shoots him in the leg. So we don't have to suffer through ANOTHER rape scene, but the spirit was still there, almost like the movie snapped its fingers and said "Darn!" as she got away on his bike.
That doesn't mean there's no sex. Oh no, there is. The first 10 minutes shows a lesbian sex scene in not-too-graphic, Showtime-level detail, but it does bring up the first thing here that's going to make me sound like a really big jerk, but it really pissed me off by the end of this series: For a girl who spends a whole lot of time naked on screen, Noomi Rapace is not pleasant to look at.
I can't believe how often this series made me look at her muscled, flap-jack, empty leather water-skin dugs. There's nothing wrong with small breasts. None at all. But that doesn't mean all of them are nice to look at. She looks like if Robert Smith circa 1985 shaved his chest and hit the gym. I have a nicer rack than this chick. Do you have any idea how weird that is for me to watch? I'm not even going to bring up the topic of the armpit hair. Europe is weird.
All I'm saying is that if you're making a movie starring a woman with a small, boyish figure who spends a lot of time naked, fine, but could you at least cast someone with tits that don't have the same texture and consistency as Sylvester Stallone's face?
Anyways, now that I've exposed myself as a total chauvinist pig, let me also show myself to be a total idiot and reiterate the fact that I found this movie to be insufferably confusing. Perhaps it was the foreign names, but I never had any idea who any of the characters were ever talking about past the two leads. The plot is so convoluted and twisty-turny that it makes my head swim keeping the names and facts straight, and the plot is all revealed through one talky scene of exposition after another.
See, this is the same reason I don't like mobster movies in general. There's always that scene in the police headquarters where they have the white board on the wall with dozens of photos on it, and the chief investigator on the case starts flapping his gums and pointing at the board. He says something like "Vinceti is Lazaro's nephew who was working for Cabrone, but he was also working as a mole for Panini. Don Ricardo found out and had Vinceti whacked, but Johnny C., who was Lazaro's concigliere ordered the hit on Ricardo without Lazaro's say-so, so he BLAH BLAH BLAH GLAAAAAAHHHH"
I never have the slightest clue what they're talking about. And that's where the movie always loses me. Whenever a lot of names get thrown at me like that, I can never keep track. It also doesn't help that I'm not too good with faces. Working in retail for a decade will do that to you. That's exactly what happened to me with The Girl Who Played With Fire. So many Swedish names and connections fly by that I have no way to keep track of them all, and they all sound like variations of "HONG-FLUUR" or "BLURN-QWIST," so I don't know who anyone is.
I know that it has something to do with a shadowy section of the government trying to hush up Lisbeth because she...knows something, I guess? To be honest, that was really never made clear to me. Why do they want Lisbeth dead? I don't know. Why is anyone doing anything here? Something to do with the sex slave trade. And naturally nearly every male member of the Swedish government is involved with it, and some even have their own personal sex slave they keep chained up in their guest room. I hope to one day be that well-off. Once again, yay, Stieg Larsson.

Waaaarriors...come out to plaa-aaaay...

One thing I did find out though, that I must correct from my last note is the fact that Lisbeth's father is not, in fact, dead. She did set him on fire though. Oh boy, did she ever set him on fire. But he evidently was some kind of Russian defector who...I guess did evil things back there and continued to do them in Sweden even after he defected. I guess.
I swear I watched this thing and paid attention. Anyway, he's still alive and she tries to kill him but ends up getting shot 3 times and buried alive. But she lives.
What.
In what is probably the most ridiculous "Oh shit we can't have the main character die" moment I think I've ever seen outside the Harry Potter franchise, Lisbeth gets shot 3 times INCLUDING A SHOT TO THE HEAD, and then proceeds to get buried, straight up Joe-Pesci-in-the-desert-gangster-style, for what could not have been less than a half hour. I judged this based on the fact that she was buried at night in the pitch black dark, but clawed her way out in the full out daylight. Giving the movie a HUGE benefit of the doubt, I'm saying it must have been early morning when they buried her. Even so, there is no way that much sunlight arrived in anything less than the time it would take to make a full spaghetti diner, including the garlic bread. Call me a skeptic but I don't think you could hold your breath for that long. Especially after you were SHOT IN THE HEAD.
Then the movie abruptly ends like it's tired of this game and is taking its ball and going home. Lisbeth is really messed up, her dad is slightly less so, having only suffered an axe to the head and leg, and the male lead arrives to say the only line of dialogue he says to her in the whole movie. "Don't worry. It's me." That's the only scene the two leads have together, and I don't think it really counts because I don't think she was really conscious. They get Lisbeth to da choppa and then...credits. Awesome.

"Lisbeth...can I borrow 5 bucks?" 

 I can't help but draw comparisons to The Empire Strikes Back with this ending. Seriously. The spunky underdog who isn't ready for the challenge bravely but foolishly rushes into the final confrontation, the "I AM YOUR FATHER" moment, someone *almost* loses a hand, the hero is saved from the brink of death but really beat up, and we end with a ship (helicopter) flying away into the credits with absolutely no closure whatsoever.
Only it wasn't awesome like The Empire Strikes Back.
That's all I've got for The Girl Who Played With Fire. In the end, it was just too confusing for me to care about what was happening.