To discover what she wants to know, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) daubs herself in white face paint with a Joker-like red slash for a mouth, then rigs up a makeshift gallows to hang a sex offender till he talks. The scene might stretch credibility as far as the victim's neck, but it also sets up one of the moral ambiguities that are a big part of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy’s appeal. The original title of the first book reads, in translation, Men Who Hate Women, suggesting either a feminist clarion call or a slab of misogynistic and voyeuristic pulp. Similarly, Lisbeth Salander’s uncompromising self-empowerment makes her a role model for many women, yet at the same time she is a tattooed, transgressive, bisexual cyber-geek, garbed in almost fetishistic streetwise grunge attire, and so an object of male wish fulfillment.

The plot concerns sex trafficking involving people in high places. Lisbeth, thanks to her hacking skills, finds herself framed for murder on her return from a sojourn in the Caribbean (a prelude in the book dispensed with here). Her hunting down of the real perpetrator brings her into close proximity with a murderous thug built like a stone troll and impervious to pain, folk being burned and buried alive, and dangerous truths much closer to home. Meanwhile, Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) finds himself always several steps behind Lisbeth but determined to prove her innocence despite the weight of evidence to the contrary.

The plot makes no apologies for its novelistic origins, and marginal characters play key parts in its progression and in holding its disparate threads together. This second instalment of the trilogy also expects of the cinemagoer prior knowledge of the first, and feels at times like being plonked in the middle of a mini-series. It isn’t directed by Niels Arden Oplev, either. Instead, we get Daniel Alfredson, who opts for a more claustrophobic and by-the-numbers procedural approach – gone are those bright, cold, existentially lonely Scandinavian expanses. Nor does Fire have the full smörgåsbord production values of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. It feels like the Swedish equivalent of a Film 4 venture, expertly done but lacking the expansive spread Tattoo possessed.

The one main weakness of what is an uneven but ultimately effective thriller is the absence of any sustained deepening of insight into the central characters. In Tattoo we were led into the discovery of Lisbeth Salander at the same time as an intriguing mystery thriller plot unfurled before us; the convergence of these two strands made for compelling cinema. While there is one major revelation in Fire, the film lacks that highly wrought intertwining of character exposition with plot. We already know the characters, and the fact that Lisbeth and Blomkvist share almost zero screen time together is a compounding frustration.

Fire has a less intriguing plot than did Tattoo, and is not, in my opinion, as good a film; still, it’s superior thriller fare, with the same dark edginess as its predecessor. Some viewers may find Larsson's mix of metropolitan realism with comic book fantasy unbelievable, but if quirky sub-genre splicing and noirish graphic novel heroines are part of your staple diet then this will be no more difficult a mixture to swallow than those legendary rounds of coffee, sandwiches, junk food and cigarettes were for the workaholic Larsson.

What Fire does have, of course, is Noomi Rapace, who seems effortlessly charismatic as Lisbeth. Not since the days of Betty Davis and Lauren Bacall has an actress smoked cigarettes with such disdainful allure! Which brings us back to that central ambiguity: whatever else Lisbeth Salender might represent, with her presence, aplomb and singular looks she is quite certainly meant to be sexy.

Like Tattoo, Fire is an escapist thriller fantasy which manages to incorporate some pertinent realistic concerns into the mix, a mix that some will find difficult to swallow. Even though it is not as taut as Lisbeth’s noose and is ofter as garish as her melodramatic avenger face paint, this second film instalment of Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy is still a bloody good night out at the flicks. After all, it’s a rare movie that allows its characters to interact for periods longer than thirty seconds as well as busy themselves trying to burn, bury alive or use pocket-sized tasers to fry the genitalia of Hell's Angels rapists.