It’s no fun being a middle child. You lack the lustre of everything being new that comes with the first, and the moment anyone knows there’s another coming after you, everyone just wants to move on to the next thing. The Girl Who Played with Fire plays like the poor, forgotten middle child in the string of adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s mega-bestselling thriller trilogy: a little bland, and with a tendency to act out in ridiculous ways to try to draw attention to itself.

The ingredients that made the first film of the trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, so good are still here. Noomi Rapace is back as Lisbeth Salander, the dark-haired, rail-thin, cyber-punk hacker who disappeared with a bundle of cash at the end of the last film, and Michael Nyqvist returns as Mikael Blomkvist, the leftist magazine reporter who became her unlikely sidekick. But whereas the first film thrived on the odd-couple interaction and surprising sexual tension between the pair, Fire keeps them apart for nearly the entire movie.

It could have played on the tension of whether these two would find their way back to one another, but that tension just isn’t there. For one thing, the movie takes a large chunk of its first hour just figuring out what it’s going to be about. There’s a prominent subplot about human trafficking and attitudes regarding prostitution, but just when you think that’s going to drive the movie, Lisbeth gets framed for a number of murders, and she’s on the run and in hiding, while Mikael tries to figure out who framed her and why. The trafficking subplot is still there, but relegated to an afterthought. Meanwhile, more of Lisbeth’s past, and the violent relationship with her father brought up in the first film, is explained further.