The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (2010)

The final installment of the late Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy has finally arrived on U.S. movie screens. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest picks up right where The Girl Who Played with Fire ended, so if you’re not caught up through that point on the adventures of Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, consider this review a SPOILER ALERT on events from the first two stories.

Our multiple-pierced heroine, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), begins the film in a hospital, recovering from her three latest piercings courtesy of bullets fired during the climax of the previous chapter. Unfortunately, her assailant–her own father, the Soviet-era defector Zalachenko (Georgi Staykov)–also survived, and he’s recuperating from his wounds in a room just down the hall. Fortunately, Lisbeth has a compassionate young doctor (Aksel Morisse) who keeps the police and everyone else out of her room except for her lawyer, Blomkvist’s sister Annika (Annika Hallin). That’s because once Lisbeth is well enough, she faces trial in Stockholm for the attempted murder of her father, which she first attempted when she was 12.

Meanwhile, in addition to recruiting his sister to the cause, Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nykvist) plans to publish a special edition of his muckraking magazine Millennium before Lisbeth’s trial. It will be devoted to exposing “The Section,” a secret conspiracy of old, well-connected men associated with Zalachenko, and explain their reasons for targeting and framing Lisbeth since her teenage years. This leads to friction within the small staff at Millennium, especially with Mikael’s editor and ex-wife Erika (Lena Endre), when they endure threatening messages, burglaries, and even a daylight assassination attempt. It soon becomes apparent that their significant foe at Lisbeth’s trial is the prosecution’s star witness, Dr. Teleborian (Anders Ahlbom), the creepy psychiatrist who supervised Lisbeth’s teenage incarceration and now wants her declared incompetent and returned to his abusive care.

The Millennium Trilogy is only a trilogy due to the untimely death of author Stieg Larsson; he was reportedly at work on a fourth installment. Not having read the books, I must say that the film trilogy feels incomplete. Don’t get me wrong, the third film has a more satisfying ending than the cliffhanger of the second installment. But this series began with such a bang–The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was an electrifying, grisly mystery that introduced both a very memorable character and her unusual relationship with a noted investigative journalist. The intriguing, halting chemistry between these two gave an added dimension to the first tale, and one of my big issues with The Girl Who Played with Fire was the lack of that chemistry. The two characters were separated by the story, and Mikael seemed almost ancillary as the plot.

This time, it’s almost exactly the reverse. There’s a lot of Mikael here, along with his cohorts at Millennium, the police, private security, and scary old gun-toting men. Meanwhile, Lisbeth spends much of the time in a hospital bed or solitary jail cell, refusing to speak to Teleborian or answer interrogations from the police and prosecutor. We occasionally witness a brief smirk on her face or glimpse her doing one arm push-ups in her cell, but she’s almost too passive. It’s consistent with her character given the scenes of her abused past, but thw frustrated audience will undoubtedly be waiting for her to cut loose. When she does, it’s interesting but a little too late. After seeing her in plain attire through most of the movie, she finally reappears in full punk glory for her trial, which cheers the audience a bit but stretches the credibility of having an incarcerated woman wearing any of that stuff to a trial on her own competency. Lisbeth does get in some physical confrontation, too–that hulking blond brute from the second film is still around–but by that point it’s almost anticlimactic.

Again, one of the most significant weaknesses is the lack of interaction between the two leads. After the kick-ass first story, the latter two tales keep the characters too far apart, with Lisbeth’s story emphasized in part two, and Mikael’s in part three. Had Stieg Larsson lived longer, we may have had further stories that intertwined the characters more tightly. But, as they stand, I still highly recommend The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as an excellent stand-alone thriller. As for The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, their appeal is more for those looking for background on Lisbeth Salander, admittedly one of the most memorable characters in recent film and literature. And let’s hope we haven’t seen the last of Noomi Rapace, who’s terrific as Lisbeth and well-deserving of more roles and wider exposure.