The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009)

  So, this is the sequel to Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and while it's not as good as the first one, it's still pretty decent.

Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) has been living the high life since the first movie ended.  She checks up on her former guardian Nils Bjurman (Peter Andersson) and finds that he's trying to have his tattoo removed.  What she doesn't know is that Bjurman is also caught up in a human trafficking ring that a journalist, Dag Svensson (Hans Christian Thulin), has just sold to Millenium magaziine.  Her old buddy Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is helping Dag track down the johns.  But when Dag, his girlfriend, and Bjurman turn up murdered, all the evidence seems to point to Lisbeth.  She and Blomkvist must track down the real killers before the cops catch her.  Unfortunately, this will involve going deep into Lisbeth's past.

I'm not really sure where the third one has room to go after this since they've now laid her backstory bare.  I'm sure I'll eventually find out but I'm not in any rush.

This one seemed to go by pretty slowly without being suspenseful enough to warrant that kind of build-up.  If you've seen the first one, you pretty much know who the Big Bad is and why.  At that point it's just a matter of details.  There was one scene where a good character behaves so stupidly I was actively wishing for his death, but was conflicted because the bad guy was also acting like a complete moron.  It left me very unsure who to root for.

Overall, it was a solid effort but I would have liked more of an impact.