"The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" - REVIEW

The single eye-catching, fabulous image in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, is that of punk hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) walking down a dingy corridor in full uber-goth regalia: lots of spikes, clinking metal accessories, dark eye make-up, and a mohawk that looks like it belongs on top of a Roman helmet. This is the ultimate Lisbeth, the borderline fantasy look of Stieg Larsson's creation, and like the character in the novels, it's sorely out of place in material that is far beneath it.

So many cinematic adaptations of novels are beaten up by those who read the source material first. It's usually a case of fans feeling as though the story or characters have been gutted for some less-than-artistic-reason. Sadly that's not the case with the "Girl" films, because their source material was never that strong to begin with. Lisbeth Salander really deserves to be the star of a much better series, and yet unfortunately she's trapped in a so-so trilogy and equally so-so film trilogy. In fact, the only thing overly positive I can say about Hornet's Nest is that it's a step up from the god-awful previous installment, The Girl Who Played With Fire.

Picking up immediately from where Fire left off, Hornet's Nest begins with Lisbeth being flown to a hospital, bloody, dirt-covered, and with a bullet lodged in her brain. As she begins to make her painful recovery, Mikael Blomqvist (the blaaaaaaaand Mikael Nyqvist) begins work on a publishing a sprawling account of the injustices Lisbeth has endured, seeing as her trial will begin as soon as her medical recovery is complete. Meanwhile, the Evil folks at The Section, a select group of corrupt members of the Swedish government, try to figure out how best to deal with the hospitalized Salander.

The big problem with all of this boils down to two major points, both of which are taken directly from the novel. The first is that the central duo of Salander and Blomqvist spend even less time together than they did before. If my memory serves me correctly, the pair share barely two scenes together. For Salander's part this is bearable, but not so for Blomqvist. As embodied by Nyqvist, the character has become even less interesting than he was in the previous films. Having him bounce off of Salander is the only thing that made Larsson's lame author-insert remotely intriguing. But the bigger problem here, though, is that Lisbeth's role feels diminished in what should be her story. We spend much more time looking at the team of the Millennium Magazine in this installment, and even though it's necessary, it doesn't really help that much. Lisbeth is the character worth rooting for; she's the victim of horrific injustice, not Blomqvist or Erika (Lena Endre, looking slightly confused in most scenes).

Worse, the film seems to be consciously trying to fix some of the mistakes that director Daniel Alfredson and screenwriter Jonas Frykberg made in Fire, namely, the involvement of the police force characters. Officers Bublanski and Modig, who are given so much time in the books and at least have a decent number of lines (well...sort of) in the film, are close to non-entities in Hornet's Nest, which only illustrates what a mistake it was to try and give them even table scraps in the last installment. And speaking of table scraps, that's more or less what Rapace has to work with. The story requires her to simply be silent for a good portion, and then when opportunities for her to shine arise, they rarely come through. Granted, the silence is part of the character, but here it just feels frustrating. The only thing really satisfying about the performance are the 3 (maybe four) times that Salander smiles, and I'm using that term lightly; they're a perfect fit for the character, and are among the few, if not only, little details in the film that work.

And then, when the film finally goes through its lumpy, misshapen plot, complete with a tacked-on fight after the legal drama is over, it ends on a frustrating note. I won't spoil it, but let's just say that while it's not supposed to be a big moment, the timing and editing don't really allow the scene to sink in, making the strange cut to a wide shot of Stockholm (over which the credits roll) feel like an awkward question mark. It's a shame really that such a remarkable character is being given such a thoroughly unremarkable send-off. As I've said before, these films only make me welcome the American remake even more. The saying goes, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," but as far as the source novels and their Swedish adaptations are concerned, there's plenty that's "broke."

Grade: C