Currently available on DVD: "The Girl Who Played With Fire"

That Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has gone a bit Hollywood. With The Girl Who Played with Fire, the anti-heroic heroine of Stieg Larsson’s series of thriller novels has a Hollywood-paced story, but also tidbits of Hollywood melodrama tossed in.

There are coincidences and cleverly timed “shocking” revelations. Characters are conveniently knocked out by villains who don’t quite finish this or that “job.” There’s lots of gun-play, even a car chase, through the Stockholm streets, on the sidewalks, the works.

A bit conventional, as far as thrillers go. But a little Hollywood doesn’t hurt this sequel, which has a different director (Daniel Alfredson). He sees to it that the story rushes by at a much faster clip, delivers its first jolts moments after the opening credits and serves up surprisingly tender moments amidst the suspense and heart-pounding action.

A brief memory sequence re-acquaints us with Lisbeth Salander, still played with feral, cigarette-sucking glee by Noomi Rapace — 28 years old, 88 pounds of bitter, paranoid fury. A year has passed since the missing person case she helped Mikeal Blomqvist (Michael Nyqvist) solve, by hook or by crook. Her computer “research” skills have made her wealthy, but there’s still that beastly “guardian” in her life, still has issues with one and all that keeps her distant, in hiding.

Blomqvist’s magazine is about to publish a story on sex trafficking when the reporter and grad student who wrote it are murdered. Another death has the cops sure it’s Lisbeth. She hides and starts to sniff around. And Blomqvist, without ever making contact, starts sniffing around himself. As in Dragon Tattoo, their digging turns up skeletons from Sweden’s past. The twist here is that Lisbeth’s troubled back story — foreshadowed in both films — begins to come to light.

The performances have a crusty shell to them. Lisbeth has sex, but never love. She uses people, but regrets it. Blomqvist has an affair with a colleague, but he won’t let it get serious. And as he tries his tricks of the journalistic trade to get people to talk, he lets us in on what a hardcase he is.

“Do you realize my life with be destroyed if you publish this?”

“Yes.”

Yes, it’s pretty much a must to have seen the first film. Where Dragon Tattoo felt like fall, Played with Fire was shot in the Swedish summer, which suits the faster pace, ramped up violence and fresh collection of supporting players — cops, a kickboxer, and a couple of borderline Bond villains. But just as in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire (in Swedish and French with English subtitles) boils down to two characters, their parallel quests and those magic moments these two very different people make contact, physical or electronic.