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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE
HORNET'S NEST The girl with the dragon tattoo had already kicked the political hornet’s nest in the two earlier films, but her revenge is fully played out in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the final film adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s internationally best-selling “Millennium” trilogy. Opening just minutes after the end of part two, The Girl Who Played with Fire, newbies to the series should be able to follow the unraveling of the conspiracy against her through flashbacks and the repeated exposition and root heartily for her. Scripter Ulf Rydberg considerably pares down the fast-paced conclusion to the villains trying to hurt or help the abused tattooed hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), with only a couple of loose ends left out. Gravely wounded, both she and her long lost father, a sadistic ex-Soviet defector-turned-psychopath, are hospitalized after trying to kill each other. Even locked in their rooms on the same intensive care corridor where they can barely speak and move, they continue to plot against each other. Meanwhile, the authorities are overwhelmed in trying to track the killings that Liseth’s comically monstrous half-brother leaves in his wake. The pedestrian criminal hunt that targets Lisbeth for attempted murder is gradually paralleled by a more wide-ranging investigation into the governmental links to her father. Larsson’s philosophical warnings on the need to limit domestic security powers in a democracy are simplified here to a more humdrum building of a case against rogue lawbreakers. (His trustworthy investigators work in a division of “Constitutional Enforcement.”) But the author’s original theme of institutional complacence towards violence against women, thankfully less visually displayed in this installment, is revived by having Lisbeth’s lawyer Annika Giannini (Annika Hallin) specialize in domestic abuse, not criminal, cases. The ensuing courtroom showdown is made more central to the drama, though Lisbeth’s triumphant smirking plays a bit too much to the gallery, especially when she appears in full-black leather regalia of punk make-up and piercings. Her nemesis, the psychiatrist Dr. Peter Teleborian (Anders Ahlbom Rosendahl), is demolished on the stand too much like Macy’s anti-Santa Claus psychologist in Miracle on 34th Street (1947). Her lawyer is the sister of the returning investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), who brings his Millennium magazine staff in to supplement the official research and reveal the truth about Lisbeth’s past, helped by the bed-bound Lisbeth’s computer sleuthing. The audience is spared here Mikael’s somewhat not credible sexual adventures, though doubtless they will gain more chemistry when he is played by Daniel Craig in David Fincher’s upcoming Hollywood remake. The new, and most deliciously realized, element is the fleshing out of the Cold War warriors in the Swedish intelligence service, whose plotting reaches into the hospital, the police, and the court. (I wasn’t really convinced until the final arrests that the investigators Blomkvist was cooperating with hadn’t been compromised by these wily old hands in espionage.) Played by a snarling array of evocative character actors, they are elderly, limping, riddled with fatal cancer or attached to a dialysis machine, but they are still determined to protect their decades of secret operations with the Soviet defector and to eliminate anyone who threatens to reveal the truth. Of course,
it may be premature to say good-bye, at least in Swedish, to this
amazingly resilient girl (especially since we still haven’t learned the
story behind that tattoo). There continues to be rumors of additional
installments that the late Larsson left on a computer that hasn’t been
hacked. Yet.
Nora Lee Mandel
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