Run Away! It’s THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE No, Really! Run Away!
© A.J. Malouin 2010
(Rating: 11 by A.J. Malouin.)
(See our side-bar page “How We Rate Movies”)
(2009/Sweden/Denmark/Germany. Directed by Daniel Alfredson.)
We’ve had technical problems lately on the blog, and so have not been able to warn you away from “Flickan some lekte med elden” [“The Girl Who Played With Fire.”]
Hopefully you have not inflicted This Thing upon yourself in the meantime!
Here is part of an e-mail this writer recently sent to several members of “A.J Malouin’s Movies @ Gayle’s Chocolates”…
“Hello, Everyone!
“Saw ‘Flickan some lekte med elden’ [‘The Girl Who Played With Fire’] in-theatre yesterday [09 July 2010.]
“I found it even less-satisfying than the first movie in this morass. This series seems (to this reviewer, anyway) to be a tawdry sequence of sensationalism with no real merit to it. That audiences around the world would flock to content of this type is (to me, anyway) vaguely alarming. There is nothing redeeming and no net take away from these first two movies. Both seem to be lingering on the Very Outer-Most Edges of both Sadism, and Soft Porn. The stories in both movies bump along in jumps and starts, as if trying to take we the audience from one sensationalistic set piece to another. They-the-stories take us there on the kind of ramshackle trolley upon which Pogo and his swamp-critter friends would ride. One hopes for an entertainment value, at least, from these two mass hysterias of popular culture. I found this NOT to be the case — although, turning my eyes from the screen to the audience (a bad sign, indeed!) I found the audience-with-me to be one which enjoyed this adventure quite a bit.
“I am obviously in the vast minority in thinking that this series is without any filmic merit, hardly!
“Daniel Craig cast in the ‘American’ version? Probably a good choice…although tooooo smooth in the face for the material. Craig wuz awfully miscast as Bond: tooooo muscular, and not sophisticated at all.
“He seemed perfect, however, in ‘Layer Cake,’ a film Malouin highly recommends.
“Wouldn’t Uma Therman have been a better choice for The Girl? or Charlize Theron? Carey Mulligan seems too “slight” and even Pretty to carry off this role. ¡Veremos!
“(It *might* be a good meeting for our club to re-view the original on DVD and then see the “American” version in-theatre upon its release…and discuss the two of them at Gayle’s. No pesky sub-titles in the re-make!!)”
But wait, there’s more!
The original title of the book upon which all this is based was apparently “Men Who Hate Women.” That theme was readily apparent, and disgustingly so, in the first movie.
The fact is, while riding over to a viewing sponsored by the East Side Coalition, we discovered, last Wednesday (14 July 2010) that a girl from Sweden, who married an American, reported that, in Sweden, women are treated like objects.
We do not know if this is true, or not. Apparently, however, that’s what the author who spawned these books-into-movies was trying to communicate.
It seems that the communication could have been made, however, without nearly the sensationalism that these first two movies in the trilogy have portrayed on-screen.
Consider a film like “The Squid and the Whale,” in comparison, for a more-successful way in which certain themes are delivered.
These first two “The Girl Who…” movies have very little of the filmmaker’s art in them.
The second movie, to repeat, has even less to recommend it than the first un-recommendable movie had.
In the first movie, a journalist and a computer hacker, strange bed-fellows indeed, worked together, somehow, to solve a mystery. There were interesting places to visit in the first film: the family estate, and the island upon which it sat, are two examples which spring to mind. Also, although spotty, there was a traceable narrative thread and story in the script. The pacing and drama-building of the thing made it almost worthy of spending the time it took to watch it.
In the second movie? All those elements have ruptured completely and we are into watching a slip-shoddery family soap opera spiked with nudity (female only, girls!) and lots of violence, yet again.
For many in the audience with whom this writer saw this thing, that was enough.
[If you find merit in these two movies, send your e-mail comment to < 50films@ malouin.us > and we’ll publish them here. — Ed.]
(2 hr 09. Rated “R” in the USA for brutal violence including a rape, some strong sexual content, nudity and language. In Swedish, Italian, and French with American subtitles in the USA. With Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander, Michael Nyqvist as Mikael Blomkvist, Lena Endre as Erika Berger, Sofia Ledarp as Malin Erikson, Peter Andersson as Nils Bjurman, Georgi Staykov as Alexander Zalachenko, Yasmine Garbi as Miriam Wu, Tehilla Blad as Young Lisbeth, and many Others.)