REVIEW: 'The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest'

The third film based on the best-selling Millenium book trilogy by Stieg Larsson (after The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire). Now playing nationwide. Click here for session info.
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The final instalment of the Stieg Larsson thriller series has everything you’d expect – pulse-racing escape scenes, eye-wateringly violent encounters and an over-arching intelligence that keeps its central investigations authentic. Just don’t expect it to come bolting out of the gate like the first film. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is still the highlight of the series, whereas this often feels as though it exists to tie up loose ends.

Like the second film, The Girl Who Played With Fire, this keeps its two leads mostly apart, with a bedbound Lisbeth Salander ramping up the frustration as we wait for her to hurry up and recover and get back into the action. Noomi Rapace is steely and heroic but her character’s enduring silence does little to propel her chance for justice, or the development of her character. The structure of the film, which is largely a legal procedural, will also test viewers’ patience.

Rather than Salander at the heart of the film, it’s her long-distance journalist friend Micke Blomkvist (the excellent Michael Nyqvist) who provides the reliable anchor as he and his cohorts try to unravel this densely plotted conspiracy. The finale of the trilogy builds into a powerful (if hard to swallow) climax and should give the Americans putting together the English version much to work with. Ain’t no happy resolution and neat and tidy ending here. Semi-satisfying, if you can keep up.

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