This is the sequel to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, of which I have spoken earlier. In many ways, it's the continuation of that film, rather than a sequel proper. In the previous film, we were introduced to Lisbeth Salander, a deeply troubled, highly intelligent and often ruthless computer geek. In this film, we get to learn a bit more about her, and what makes her the way she is.
At the end of the last film, she'd escaped from her evil guardian, a court appointed lawyer appointed to manage her affairs because she has been ruled, for some reason, incompetent. She had done this by embezzling a huge amount of money from a bad man, gone on the lam with it, and blackmailing her guardian to send in glowing reports about her, on pain of exposing him as the rapist he is.
As we start the film, this status quo is changing, with Lisbeth deciding to end her exile overseas, and with Persons Unknown conspiring with the Evil Guardian to deal with the Salander situation permanently.
Meanwhile, Mikael Blomkvist's magazine, Millenium, is working with a couple of young journalists, to publish a story exposing the depths to which a human trafficking operation has corrupted Swedish officialdom. Inevitably, this leads to some deaths, and Lisbeth ends up framed for them.
Thus, Lisbeth is on the run again, attempting to track down who framed her and why, and god help anyone who gets in her way. Meanwhile, Blomkvist is attempting to track down the real murderer, convinced that Lisbeth is innocent.
Dramatically, it's not as good as the first film; there's less of a plot, less of a mystery. The mystery that there is - Who is Lisbeth Salander, and why is she so important? - is obviously something we're very interested in, but the trail of skeletons in the closet is less intriguing than in the first film. I'm led to believe that the intrigue gets into full swing again in the third film, so in the second, what we're really doing is getting to know Lisbeth a bit better.
And of course, that's a really good thing, because Lisbeth is a very interesting character, and played pretty magnetically by Noomi Rapace. She's got a really interesting look about her, and conveys the contradiction in her between her being a small, damaged, vulnerable girl, and an iron-hard willed badass who's determined not to let anyone hurt her again. She's simultaneously surly, incommunicative and unlikeable, and somehow deeply charming because of it. So for all that there's little else but her performance in this episode, it easily carries a two-and-a-bit hour film.
Overall, I don't suppose you can be recommended to see this film; if you didn't see the first film, then this one won't make a lot of sense, and if you did, you'll already have marked in your diary when you're going to see this one. So what I will say is, see the first one, and that the second one won't disappoint.
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