Movie Review: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

A disappointing end to a thrilling trilogy. Photo / Supplied

Rating: 2.5/5
Verdict: Part III of bestselling trilogy leaves you wanting less.

Well here it is at last. Just the movie to take your mind off all those Swedish computer hacking sex crime international conspiracies out there in the real world.

Released just a year after the first, it's the third movie from the late Stieg Larsson's bestselling Millennium Trilogy, the first of which is now getting the Hollywood makeover treatment.

Not only is it the last, barring some unfinished manuscripts, it sure is the longest. Whatever the page-turning quality of Larsson's writing was, it's lost quite a lot in the translation here.

Of course it's got a lot to tidy up after the mess its heroine Lisbeth Salander got into on the last film. There are hospital wards to invade and a courtroom drama to mount as she faces charges of attempting to kill her dear old dad in part II. That's Zalachenko, the same evil Russian defector of a father she tried to torch when she was a child and who shot her in the head.

But shot for television and re-edited for the cinema, Hornet's Nest can't seem to sustain the grim energy of its predecessors and seems burdened by both careless implausibilities (a favourite: the Swedish underworld biker club which doesn't have an unlisted number) and unexplained bogeymen (like spy cabal "The Section" which might be the root of all of the trilogy's evil but sure don't seem up to the job as revealed here).

Certainly, it's got less of the brutal violence which left part II so punch drunk

Though when her Frankenstein's monster of a half-brother reappears, having pillaged his way through the Swedish countryside, you just know the final showdown with his little sister is going to be quite something, Which it is, even if it curiously resembles the ending of the first two Terminator movies.

But it's not all about her. And Rapace spends a good deal of her time convalescing from the bullet in her brain before regrowing the mohican and polishing up her bondage gear in time for her court appearance.

That leaves much of the movie devoted to journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Nyqvist) and thrilling scenes of editorial meetings at his magazine in between romantic fumblings with his editor, much prodding of laptop keyboards and dealing with the occasional death threat as he chips away at the conspiracy behind it all which should prove Lisbeth's innocence. That's unless his heavily pregnant sister, recruited as Lisbeth's lawyer, does that first in court.

All of which leaves this film retracing the steps of the previous instalments and retelling us stuff we already knew. But it's got little new to say about the characters who seemed so fresh and fascinating in that first film.

And here, as this dreary finale winds its way to a close, the novelty of that first film soon starts to feel like it was a millennium ago.

LOWDOWN

Cast: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist
Director: Daniel Alfredson
Rating: R16 (violence, sexual violence, offensive language &content that may disturb)
Running time: 148 mins

-TimeOut