The film adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a tough act to follow. Sadly, director Daniel Alfredson doesn't even attempt to replicate its striking atmosphere or mesmerising intensity in this near TV-movie take on the second book in Stieg Larsson's bestselling Millennium trilogy. The fact that the story is a set-up for the pay-off in the third instalment, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, doesn't help; nor does the fact that the two central characters - crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and multi-pierced hacker/social misfit Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) - spend most of the film apart, as the former tries to clear the latter of a triple murder charge. This plotline expands to involve a decades-old sex-trafficking conspiracy and offers further insight into the troubled background of Rapace's ever-fascinating Lisbeth. It's efficient enough, in the vein of a Swedish episode of Wallander, but fans of the novels will no doubt overlook its deficiencies and thrill to it.