Movie Review: Passion (2012)

Genre: Thriller  

Director: Brian De Palma  

Starring: Rachel McAdams, Noomi Rapace  

Running Time: 97 minutes  

Synopsis: Advertising executive Christine (Rachel McAdams) claims credit for a marketing campaign developed by her protégé Isabelle (Noomi Rapace). Both women are sleeping with the corrupt Dirk, while Isabelle's assistant Dani has her own agenda. With career ambitions at stake, the feud between Christine and Isabelle escalates to public humiliations, blackmail threats, substance abuse, and ultimately, murder.

What Works Well: The murder sequence is effectively staged side-by-side with a ballet performance.

What Does Not Work As Well: Director and writer Brian De Palma attempts to roll back the years to the 1980's era of erotic thrillers, but this flaccid effort is almost laughably inept. Unfortunately both Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace are miscast and poorly served by an inane script targeting smoldering intrigue but only finding logic gaps and superficial glitz barely concealing budget limitations. Somehow the idea of a lesbian romance is here still treated as dangerous, but even more archaic are the repeated rounds of was-it-all-a-dream wake-up moments, and the long-lost twin trope.

Key Quote:

Christine (to Isabelle): You're shocked because I took credit for your idea. Honestly, I would expect you to do the exact same thing in my place. 

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Movie Review: Close (2019)

Genre: Action Thriller  

Director: Vicky Jewson  

Starring: Noomi Rapace, Sophie Nelisse, Indira Varma  

Running Time: 94 minutes  

Synopsis: After escorting reporters through a Middle East war zone, close protection officer Sam (Noomi Rapace) is assigned to protect mining company heiress Zoe (Sophie Nelisse) on a trip from Europe to Morocco. Zoe has just inherited all her father's company shares, much to the disappointment of her step-mother Rima (Indira Varma). With the company in the middle of critical negotiations to acquire properties in Zambia, Zoe becomes an attack target as soon as she arrives at the family's fortified kasbah in Morocco. Sam has to protect her client in a foreign country, and is not sure who to trust.

What Works Well: The opening sequence featuring an ambush on a dusty desert road is a thrilling introduction to Sam's skill and temperament. Director Vicky Jewson delivers well-staged and coherent action scenes, and Noomi Rapace's moody persona is a good fit for the dour and frequently bruised security consultant operating in a perpetual trust-free zone.

What Does Not Work As Well: The script is too ambitious for the available budget. The business aspects related to stepmom Rima navigating a high pressure mining deal and fending off a rival company are laughably under-produced. The plot is too late sorting out the bad guys from the good guys, leaving a muddle of loose ends and dead-but-anyway-barely-defined characters to be swept into the bargain bin. 

Key Quote:

Zoe: I don't care what you think about me.

Sam: I don't think anything about you.

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Movie Review: Unlocked (2017)

Genre: Espionage Thriller  

Director: Michael Apted  

Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Douglas, Orlando Bloom, Toni Collette, John Malkovich  

Running Time: 98 minutes  

Synopsis: In London, CIA Agent Alice Racine (Noomi Rapace) is an interrogation specialist traumatized by her inability to prevent a bombing in Paris two years ago. She is called back to active service to interrogate an apprehended courier who holds key information about an impending terrorist attack involving biological weapons. Her assignment quickly spirals into a race against time involving Alice's ex-boss Eric Lasch (Michael Douglas), former soldier Jack Alcott (Orlando Bloom), MI5 Intelligence Chief Emily Knowles (Toni Collette), and CIA Europe Division Chief Bob Hunter (John Malkovich).

What Works Well: This a smart, well-constructed, fast-paced, and twist-filled thriller. Writer Peter O'Brien minimizes over-the-top action scenes in favour of strategic and tactical surprises, rewarding concentration, thoughtfulness, and anticipation. With an emphasis on efficiency, veteran director Michael Apted maintains control over content-rich plot machinations fueled by a trust deficit. Noomi Rapace leads a stellar cast with a combination of grim determination and resourcefulness, while Orlando Bloom, John Malkovich, Toni Collette, and Michael Douglas add quality in smallish roles.

What Does Not Work As Well: With so much going on, it's no surprise that some of the details get frazzled, and important characters are short-changed in a crowded cast list. 

Conclusion: Unlocks refreshingly serious spy schemes.



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Movie Review: The Secrets We Keep (2020)

Genre: Drama Thriller  

Director: Yuval Adler  

Starring: Noomi Rapace, Joel Kinnaman, Chris Messina, Amy Seimetz  

Running Time: 97 minutes  

Synopsis: It's the late 1950s, and Romanian Maja (Noomi Rapace) is still haunted by her European wartime experiences, although she is now settled in a quiet town in the United States with her husband Doctor Lewis Reid (Chris Messina). Maja spots refinery worker Thomas Steinman (Joel Kinnaman), a newcomer in town, and is convinced he is actually Karl, a Nazi unit member who abused her in the final days of World War Two. Maja's quest for revenge will upturn her life.

What Works Well: This study of the past haunting the present is brimming with layers of secrets and emotional conflict, both within characters and between them, as the plot boldly seeks surprises and challenging paths. Noomi Rapace delivers a powerhouse performance of quiet rage, determination, and clashing motivations. The other cast members also do well, with Joel Kinnaman jealously guarding the question of guilt, and Amy Seimetz (as Thomas' wife Rachel) growing in prominence as Maja widens her search for the truth.

What Does Not Work As Well: Several plot details are questionable, including a sudden turn to violence by seemingly peaceful characters, gunshots not raising alarm on a quiet street, and the erratic actions of Maja's husband Lewis. The final twist favours shock value over character coherence, leading to an abrupt ending that fails to balance build-up with release.

Conclusion: Small towns can shelter big secrets.



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Movie Review: Angel Of Mine (2019)

A psychological suspense thriller, Angel Of Mine is a story of an unhinged mother surrendering to obsession. The plot bounces between decent, repetitive, and unsatisfying.

In Melbourne, Lizzie (Noomi Rapace) is still grieving her infant daughter, who was among the casualties in a hospital maternity ward fire seven years prior. Now Lizzie's marriage to Mike (Luke Evans) has disintegrated, and she is struggling to maintain even partial custody of her teenaged son Thomas.

At a birthday party for one of Thomas' school friends, Lizzie spots seven-year-old Lola, and becomes convinced she is her daughter. Lizzie surreptitiously befriends Lola's parents Claire and Bernard (Yvonne Strahovski and Richard Roxburgh), and feigns interest in buying their house. Her behaviour becomes more erratic as she stalks Lola at every opportunity, and Claire realizes her family may be in grave danger.

Angel Of Mine is propelled by a mother's profound grief and unshakeable belief - against all logic - that her instincts are correct and everyone else is either wrong or lying. While the drama is naturally potent, co-writers Luke Davies and David Regal don't provide their main character Lizzie with much help. Her ordeal is sustained by nothing more than conviction, tilting the scale towards confirming a descent into madness.

Noomi Rapace tackles the role with lively tenacity despite the occasional dip into bathos, and her desperation finds a good match in Yvonne Strahovski's cool and collected turn as counterpart Claire. The testy battle of the mothers builds up a good head of steam, and despite repetitive scenes of Lizzie making awkward appearances around Lola (in a bedroom, at school ballet show, at a picnic, at a house party), director Kim Farrant keeps the suspense balanced on the correct side of rational.

The production values are glossy without rising much above movie-of-the-week standards, until far-fetched revelations are blurted out without context. Pat emotions triumph over difficult conversations as Angel Of Mine's mix of fire and fury somehow lands at a serenely unsatisfying backyard barbeque.



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Movie Review: Black Crab (2022)

A secret mission war movie, Black Crab enjoys strong visuals in a frigid setting, but the sketch story is too vague to register.

In a prologue, the security situation in Sweden is disintegrating. Caroline Edh (Noomi Rapace) is caught up in murderous street violence and her daughter Vanja is abducted by armed men.

The main setting is a few years later, in a desperate and almost defeated Sweden ravaged by war. Now a soldier, Caroline is recruited by base commander Colonel Raad for a dangerous mission: to skate over hundreds of miles across a frozen archipelago to the town of Odo, where a devastating blow can be delivered against the enemy. Raad further motivates Caroline by revealing that Vanja has been found in Odo. 

Caroline is joined by a small team of soldiers, including the mysterious Nylund, the young Granvik, the veteran Malik, and the erratic Karimi. The journey is hazardous, the enemy is always close, and the group suffers casualties. But Caroline is eager to reunite with her daughter, even after discovering the true implications of her mission.

Black Crab is almost a good film, but does not quite make it. The Swedish production imagines a devastating war and creates grim aesthetics to match. Once the trek across the ice gets going, director Adam Berg (who also co-wrote the script) captures some majestic scenes of soldiers skating at night across an endless landscape. Noomi Rapace lends conviction, providing Caroline with the admirable determination of a soldier with not much left to lose but harbouring hope of a miraculous reunion.

Unfortunately, almost everything else is a let down. The script is just too loose, and does not bother to cover the basics. Providing no context for war to focus on a soldier's jaded viewpoint may be acceptable; it's less excusable to skip over fundamentals of the central mission. What exactly is expected of Caroline and her colleagues once they arrive at their destination is curiously elusive. Even after the contents of their secret capsules are revealed, essential mission execution tactics are missing.

Other shortcomings are simply lazy. An early interaction between Caroline and Nylund ends badly, and his suspicious behaviour remains unexplained. In the final act, the previously scrappy good guys are suddenly in control of a massive military base complete with a complex research laboratory, although Caroline and her colleagues were supposedly dispatched deep behind enemy lines. The infiltrate-the-castle climax forgets about the war and borrows from Bond movies dating back to the 1960s.

Instead of securing the fundamentals, Berg leans on Caroline's fixation to find her daughter. As presented, the mother-daughter bond is simply not strong enough to carry the drama's weight. 

The narrative faults are more painful because the potential for a high quality war movie is evident. Black Crab packs promise, but carelessly drops it through the ice.



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Movie Review: Stockholm (2018)

A crime drama, Stockholm recreates the bank robbery at the origin of the condition known as the Stockholm Syndrome.

It's 1973, and an armed man who might be Kaj Hansson (Ethan Hawke) storms a large bank in central Stockholm. He takes a few hostages including tellers Bianca (Noomi Rapace) and Klara (Bea Santos), and demands the release of his friend Gunnar Sorensson (Mark Strong) from prison, a Mustang and $1 million. Police Chief Mattsson (Christopher Heyerdahl) handles the negotiations, and with widespread live television coverage, the event becomes a national crisis.

Bianca, a married mother of two children, establishes an unusual connection with Kaj. She tries to keep him calm and he promises not to kill her, despite his uttered threats to Mattsson. Gunnar is delivered to the bank to appease Kaj and potentially help in the negotiations. Prime Minister Olof Palme (Shanti Roney) insists the hostages be freed before the criminals are allowed to leave the bank, further inflaming the crisis, but the bond between the bank robber and Bianca only grows stronger.

The Stockholm Syndrome refers to hostages gaining sympathy for their aggressors, a phenomenon that first came to light due to the widespread media coverage of the 1973 bank hold-up. Loosely based on the actual event, Stockholm treads lightly into the terrain of psychology as assailants and hostages are placed under duress. Canadian director Robert Budreau orchestrates an uneasy melange of tension, humour and provocative romance, all fuelled by the unstable but undoubtedly charismatic bank robber.

Budreau's script brings the dynamics between Kaj and Bianca to the fore, and finds the seeds of affinity germinating in their humanity. She is an even-tempered employee, wife and mother, desperate to survive the ordeal and see her children again (her husband, not so much). He carries the weapons without really ever being in control of the situation, but senses her strength. The hostage-taking drags on for several days, allowing their relationship to evolve from survival codependency to something more.

But for a story about people more than events, Stockholm is limited in scope to what happens in the bank. Although a few scenes of dialogue attempt to invest in background depth, the characters' actions are undermined by insufficient definition. Ironically Bianca emerges as the slightly better rounded person, Noomi Rapace grabbing hold of Bianca's spirit and personal frustrations in a phenomenal scene where she gives cooking instructions to her wobbly husband. Ethan Hawke has less to work with, and resorts to stock nervous gunman mannerisms.

Just as the real incident was a messy and often bewildering affair, Stockholm enjoys ups and downs as a small group of people are forced into a vault, trigger fingers at the ready but with plenty of haphazard planning and wayward targeting.

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Movie Review: The Drop (2014)

A crime drama, The Drop is intense, character-rich and gracefully slow-burning.

Bob (Tom Hardy) is the quiet bartender at the Brooklyn bar owned by his cousin Marv (James Gandolfini). The bar is used as the occasional illegal cash drop point for pickup by local mobsters. Years prior Marv ran his own racket, but was outmuscled by a Chechen gang and now operates the bar on their behalf while quietly seething. The joint is also known as the last place Richie Whelan was spotted before he disappeared forever, ten years ago.

Bob rescues an abused dog from the front yard of the house where Nadia (Noomi Rapace) lives. He adopts the animal and names it Rocco, and she helps him look after it. But Bob's subdued life starts to unravel when the bar is held up, infuriating the Chechens and attracting the attention of Detective Torres (John Ortiz). Then local thug Eric Deeds (Matthias Schoenaerts) shows up, claiming Rocco is his dog, and also hinting he murdered Richie.

Directed by Michaël R. Roskam and written by Dennis Lehane adapting his own short story, The Drop is an engrossing experience. Focused tightly on people rather than events, this is a taut and dark detour into the land of crime in grimy Brooklyn neighbourhoods. Every character has something to hide and an angle on the next move, and it's always just a bit crooked. Each mess is planned to be mopped up without attracting undue police intervention, and anyway, in this world crooks tangle with crooks and the public could care less.

Roskam constructs the quadrangle of Bob, Marv, Nadia and Eric with deliberate care. The characters are provided the necessary time and depth to develop, and the bonds between them emerge in multiple and often unexpected dimensions. Lehane has many surprises in store, and first impressions about almost everything await inevitable challenges as layers of prior history, deceit and desperation are slowly revealed.

The film builds tension without any respite. The Drop has no room for interludes of humour, romance or distraction. Even when Cousin Marv's Bar is filled with Super Bowl revellers the pressure is building with stuffed envelopes discreetly changing hands, glares and glances across the room, and devious minds working overtime to outmanoeuvre each other.

The superlative cast is excellent, with Tom Hardy and James Gandolfini (in his final film, posthumously released) perfect as the reticent and gruff odd couple jointly navigating each night's new surprises. Noomi Rapace provides Nadia with a suitably moody and suspicious disposition, while Matthias Schoenaerts is shifty and unnerving as the vaguely unhinged Eric.

The Drop builds to a brilliantly subdued bang, criminal scores efficiently settled in a crime-controlled bar, everything cleaned up by the time the morning crowd filters in.

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The Movies Of Noomi Rapace

All movies starring Noomi Rapace and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2009)

The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009)

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest (2009)

Prometheus (2012)

Passion (2012)

Dead Man Down (2013)

The Drop (2014)

Alien: Covenant (2017, uncredited, voice and image only)

Unlocked (2017)

Stockholm (2018)

Close (2019)

Angel Of Mine (2019)

The Secrets We Keep (2020)

Black Crab (2022)

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.
The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Dead Man Down (2013)

A revenge crime thriller, Dead Man Down benefits from a focus on characters and a suitably grim mood.

In New York City, Victor (Colin Farrell) and his partner Darcy (Dominic Cooper) are violent gang members, part of the crew run by crime boss Alphonse (Terrence Howard). However, while pretending to be a loyal foot soldier, Victor is also on a secret and personal revenge mission, seeking retribution against Alphonse for the murder of his wife and child two years earlier.

Victor meets his neighbour Beatrice (Noomi Rapace), who lives with her mother (Isabelle Huppert). Beatrice was the victim of an accident caused by a drunk driver that left her with permanent facial scars. Having witnessed Victor commit a murder in his apartment, she demands that he kill the drunk driver, who got away with a light sentence. With Darcy investigating who is behind the threats against Alphonse, Victor has to quickly advance his complex retribution and satisfy Beatrice before his cover is blown.

Directed by Niels Arden Oplev, Dead Man Down is better than it needed to be. Oplev restricts the action set pieces to just a few punchy moments at the start, middle, and end, and keeps them short if a bit muddled in execution. Plenty of room is therefore created for a complex double revenge plot to unfurl from the middle outwards, and the characters of Victor and Beatrice occupy centre stage.

The story of Victor plotting an elaborate payback contains a compelling backstory and a patient build-up, while Beatrice is an intriguing woman, scarred physically but more deeply damaged emotionally. The two combine to create an unusually provocative duo with overlapping objectives. When the inevitable relationship evolves between them, their rage is also cast in a new light.

None of which is to say that Dead Man Down doesn't contain glaring faults. Gangster stereotypes and narrative shortcuts litter the screen, plot holes waltz through the film, and New York City is somehow suddenly devoid of law enforcement. Early in the story a gangland massacre takes place, with an exchange of gunfire worthy of a war zone, and yet none of the perpetrators are ever remotely bothered by any sort of investigation.

Oplev skips past the shortcomings with an appealing dark aesthetic, many of the scenes taking place at dusk or later, with dark blues and artificial lighting complementing the underworld milieu. And the quality of the cast also helps to ride out the weaker moments. Colin Farrell's generally expressionless persona is well suited to the secretive and scheming Victor, while Noomi Rapace matches Farrell with her sense of determined despondency. Isabelle Huppert as Beatrice's mostly deaf mother adds depth to Beatrice's domesticity. Veterans Armand Assante and F. Murray Abraham have small supporting roles.

A reasonably potent mix of action and layered plot, Dead Man Down enjoys more ups than downs.

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Movie Review: Prometheus (2012)

A deep-space science fiction horror adventure, Prometheus builds up towards some tense moments with a space crew searching for superior alien beings who may have created humanity. But despite a glossy production, the film's lofty themes are not matched by shoddy characterizations and perfunctory expositions.

In the year 2089, scientists and lovers Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) discover ancient caves in Scotland denoting alien shapes and a star map. The imagery matches others found throughout the world, leading Shaw and Holloway to conclude that aliens, dubbed The Engineers, created humankind. Aging billionaire tycoon Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), seeking the secret to eternal life, is enthralled enough to fund an expedition to make contact with humanity's creators.

By 2093, the Weyland-funded spaceship Prometheus arrives near the destination planet. Shaw and Holloway lead the scientific expedition and are accompanied by a motley crew of other experts and explorers. The icy cold Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron) commands the mission with authoritative zeal, and the vessel is captained by the more laid back Janek (Idris Elba). The robot-in-charge is David (Michael Fassbender), and he keeps the ship functioning until the crew awakens. They land and start to explore the planet's surface, finding dome-shaped installations seemingly built by the Engineers. But there are also signs that the Engineers themselves ran into trouble, and the Prometheus crew is soon threatened by internal strife as well as a horrific external menace.

Directed by Ridley Scott, Prometheus is a prequel-of-sorts to Alien, but with a more philosophical focus. The film never quite decides what it wants to be, and ends up as an uneven mishmash of origins-of-life philosophy, creature-versus-human battles for survival, and petty human conflicts. The aesthetics are gorgeous on the alien planet surface, and there are moments of effective and yucky-gooey horror, but the film is sold short by a script that truncates thoughtfulness in a rush to create conflict.

The film introduces concepts related to no less than the creation of humanity and the relationship between the creator and the created. But lacking proper courage to delve into its own themes, the conversation is limited to ancient scrawls on cave walls, and a few dialogue exchanges that barely go beyond the superficial. The extent of explaining the entire thesis behind a superior race creating humanity resides with interpretations of ancient carvings, a quite dubious premise on which to launch a trillion dollar expedition.

Instead of exploring big ideas with conviction, the script (by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof) hurriedly seeks villains with an agenda, and populates the crew with excitable and cursory characters lacking in depth and context rushing to betray one another and unleash predictable surprises.

The year may be 2093, but scientific rigour and on-board procedures have taken many steps backwards. The Prometheus crew is made up of unconvincing scientists, technicians and assorted victims-to-be. Discipline is the first casualty even before any threats appear, and the slipshod trampling over dangerous artifacts and mishandling of potentially deadly foreign matter denotes a script rushing to set-pieces and leaving large plot holes in its wake. And when they arrive, many of the highlights appear to mimic the better moments from Alien.

Shaw gets a sketched-in background story, and Noomi Rapace is effective as the most empathetic of the characters, often holding the film together. She also enjoys the most memorable moment, an impromptu self-administered emergency surgery. Michael Fassbender is also good as David the robot-in-human-form, but his secretive machinations are derivative and occasionally cross the line into ludicrous mad-scientist villainy.

Prometheus is one third interesting science, one third questionable ideology, and one third character interaction balderdash.

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Movie Review: The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest (2009)

A reasonably satisfying conclusion to the movie adaptation of Stieg Larsson's book trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest ties up most of the loose ends. That it requires almost 150 minutes to do so illustrates just how many plot threads needed to be picked up, and some remain scattered at the end regardless (remember the human trafficking and prostitution sub-plot from The Girl Who Played With Fire? It's nowhere to be found).

After the bloody conclusion of the previous episode, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest opens with both Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) and her father Zalachenko being rushed to hospital. Lisbeth is suffering from three bullet wounds, one to her skull, while Zalachenko is dealing with the nasty effects of an axe swing, courtesy of Lisbeth.

The existence of a secretive pseudo government group called The Section is soon revealed. Formed in the 1970s, The Section was responsible for protecting Zalachenko, the most high level Soviet spy to defect to Sweden. Subsequent governments lost track of The Section and Zalachenko: he became a master criminal, with The Section protecting him from any scrutiny or prosecution. But from his hospital bed, Zalachenko pushes his luck with The Section: they in turn dispatch him once and for all with a bullet to the head. An attempt on Lisbeth's life fails, but with the help of the slimy Dr. Teleborian, a plot is set in motion to put her on trial, declare her insane, and lock her up for good.

Meanwhile investigative reporter Mikael Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist) has pieced together the story of Lisbeth and Zalachenko, and prepares a major expose of the whole sordid affair, to be published in Millennium magazine. Mikael also remotely helps Lisbeth to document her story from her hospital bed, and he secures the services of his sister Annika as Lisbeth's lawyer.

With both The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest and The Girl Who Played With Fire, the aftertaste is that of movies stumbling by trying to capture all the book details, the same flaw that so hampered the adaptation of The Da Vinci Code. The reading experience can afford a multitude of characters and interesting sub-quests; the movie experience demands more focus and a much more streamlined narrative, and the screenplay needs to be brave enough to compact the story down to a suitable screen experience, as Angels And Demons more successfully demonstrated.

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest is the least action-oriented and most talkative of the three movies. This is not a bad thing: it brings the story of Lisbeth down to a real nitty-gritty of hospitalization, treatment, and law courts, and a bit away from any further dramatic rapes, tortures and murders for the poor girl to suffer through.

But with so much plot to chew and digest, director Daniel Alfredson has no time for anything else. The stylish coolness and tension of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is long gone, replaced by the most straightforward of narrative driven films, hacking away at the intertwined overgrowth of characters in a sweaty rush to reach the conclusion.

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Movie Review: The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009)

Too much plot and too many loose ends, The Girl Who Played With Fire suffers from the Middle Chapter of the Trilogy Syndrome. Not as fresh as the original and unable to arrive at any conclusions, it's a rickety bridge between the crisp opening and the decisive ending of Stieg Larsson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series.

Young and enthusiastic reporter Dag Svensson and his girlfriend Mia are investigating human smuggling and the European prostitution trade. They have an explosive story on their hands, exposing corruption at the highest levels. Dag joins the staff of the investigative Millennium magazine, where the legendary Mikael Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist) works, to polish off the story and prepare it for publication.

Meanwhile Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) returns to Stockholm from some globe-trotting to reconnect with her lover Miriam Wu (Yasmine Garbi), and to intimidate her state-appointed guardian and former torturer Bjurman. To scare him into promptly filing his reports about her good behaviour, Lisbeth threatens Bjurman with his own gun. But Bjurman is tired of Salander controlling him (she has a blackmail tape), and contacts shady associates to solve his Lisbeth problem.

Before long, Mikael finds both Dag and Mia shot dead; the murder gun belongs to Bjurman and carries Lisbeth's fingerprints, making her the prime suspect in a double murder. She stays hidden, disguised and beyond the clutches of the law, but her case isn't helped when Bjurman also shows up dead. Mikael is convinced that Lisbeth is being set up, and launches his own investigation to help clear her name.

The performances of Rapace and Nyqvist are the main positives in an otherwise overcrowded and clumsy film. Rapace is all delightful darkness, a woman who long since abandoned trust in the system and invented her rules for survival. Nyqvist as Mikael Blomqvist balances some conformance to society's rules with a natural tendency to do his own thing in his own world weary way.

Beyond these two performances, The Girl Who Played With Fire suffers from a multitude of characters introduced in a hurry and never properly fleshed out, and a runaway plot that features numerous developments trickling in all directions, most of which are left hanging. There is no satisfying resolution to the three murders that propel the action, and the entire human trafficking and prostitution plot is introduced with great enthusiasm and then simply abandoned. Director Daniel Alfredson is unable to even pretend that this episode is anything other than a pass-through to what should be a much better ending to the story.

The movie is also hampered by extremely limited interaction between Lisbeth and Mikael. They exchange a few e-mails and share a single non-communicative scene at the very end: their complex relationship is at the heart of the drama, and the Ulf Ryberg screenplay basically puts it on ice for over two hours.

The Girl Who Played With Fire is an overstuffed meal, too many ingredients competing for attention, and delivering an unsatisfying, bloated and burp inducing experience.

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