Film Review | The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest

If all good things came in threes, the world would be a much better place but alas, very few clichés turn out to be true (particularly the more positive, hopeful ones). And as such, three-tier film sagas tend to sag somewhere in the middle at best, so that the third strand of the story usually arrives after everyone’s been disappointed already.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo – both the original Steig Larsson novel and the 2009 film adaptation of the same name – exploded out of its Swedish homeland and into the international scene. Suddenly, JK Rowling and Dan Brown had a prime contender in their midst (pity he was already dead by that point).

But for all the freshness that the original brought to the scene – flagging up an institutionalised misogyny found in Swedish culture, darkly tied to fascist elements, and an electric heroine in Noomi Rapace’s Lisbeth Salander – the sheer Hollywoodlike predictability of the law of diminishing returns that reared its ugly head once the sequels began to pop up was positively depressing.

And as if to complete the cycle of commercial cinema cynicism, the series is now being remade into an American trilogy, directed by Fight Club-Se7en’s David Fincher and starring Daniel Craig in the lead role of hard-nosed, corrupt-authority-bothering journalist Mikael Blomkvist.

That role is here reprised by the similarly named Mikael Nyqvist, who is now on a mission to prove the innocence of his one time collaborator (and the saga’s true star) Lisbeth Salander, after she is accused of a variety of crimes, including the attempted murder of her psychotic father Alexander Zalachenko (Georgi Staykov).

As the net tightens around Lisbeth, so do the unsavoury elements surrounding her past, lending Mikael in a spot of bother (or three) of his own. Cut off from Lisbeth as she is first tied down in hospital, then in prison, Mikael can only communicate with his partner-in-justice intermittently. But as more and more dangerous characters shore up to the surface… something will have to give.

Daniel Alfredson, who also directed the previous instalment (The Girl Who Played With Fire), employs a similarly plodding pace throughout with this, the final salvo to what should have been a deadly dose of dark fun (the remake of the first film is enticingly billed as ‘the feel bad movie of Christmas’). For what it’s worth, it’s an improvement, as while the ‘Played With Fire’ was messy as well as being endowed with an inexplicably lurching pace, this one can only boast of the latter.

The many-layered story does come together quite neatly, with all the separate strands – Lisbeth’s confinement and recovery, the detective intrigue of Mikael and his editorial team at Millenium and the dealings of the decrepit cadre of aging monsters that helped make Lisbeth’s childhood a living hell – revealing themselves at a leisurely pace that is easy enough to grasp.

But the problem is that there is not much there. A lot of the time, watching the film just feels like being made to observe an old-school video game load its interface, pixel by pixel. For a series that is supposed to be an example of the mystery genre, it is remarkably short on twists, and Lisbeth’s courtroom comeuppance, when it arrives (doubt that was much of a spoiler, right folks?) is satisfying to a point, but just feels too calculated, too expected to enjoy to the full.

Nonetheless, the fact remains that Larsson has succeeded in creating a haunting web of misogyny and corruption, and Rapace, with her icy glare and erratic behaviour that only accommodates emotion if it is expressed through bursts of violence or sexuality, was well poised to give it a firm kick in the gonads.

If we can take something from all of this, it’s the striking talent of an actress bursting with potential, and it seems that Hollywood is listening: she will be starring alongside Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law in the sequel to Guy Ritchie’s 2009 hit Sherlock Holmes.

Here’s looking at you, kid.