Flickan som lekte med elden (Daniel Alfredson, 2009)

The second part of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy of novels, rattled off the production line in swift succession,  The Girl who Played with Fire sees a change of director and an obvious slash in budget from the first film, both of which prove detrimental.
Again, the director has to grapple with the book's unwieldy length and dispassionately implement cuts to bring the running time to manageable proportions. Niels Arden Oplev was mostly successful with this in the first film; Larsson's books do after all contain a lot of pedantic padding in anything from detailing societal background history to the characters' eating habits, which cry out to be chopped. Alfredson isn't. Even a recent reader of the novel will struggle to make sense of the opening half hour, where scant explanation is given in jumps from scene to scene (for the international viewer, having the added burden of appallingly illegible white-on-white subtitling hardly helps either). And the directorial blundering continues, with his apparent unawareness of how to translate the written medium to cinema: you can't always just show what the characters do; you have to find other means to convey what's going on in their minds lest you lose a great chunk of the rationale behind the action.
The casting, one of the strengths of the first film, remains intact. But since Alfredson doesn't give us access to the protagonists' interior drives and also severs our main empathic connection with Lisbeth Salander's fury in neglecting her crucifixion at the hands of the police and the media, it all turns into a perfunctory plod to the soapish conclusion.

5/10