Hornets’ Nest Review: This Hornet Could Use a Little More Sting

The most ardent fans of the late Stieg Larsson’s gripping Millennium trilogy will no doubt make it a point to see the film adaptation of the wildly successful novel series’ final installment, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, now out in select cities. Like many movie versions of popular books, voracious readers tend to flock to theaters in droves, anxious to compare the literary events to the cinematically altered ones. For those who simply enjoy the movies themselves, however, the startling lack of now-iconic heroine Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace, again giving Rooney Mara pretty big shoes to fill) in the crowning chapter will likely be an unwelcome surprise. Instead, Larsson’s antisocial hacking genius takes a backseat to let the conspiracy surrounding her abusive childhood unfold and take center stage to bring the series full circle. The involvement of Lisbeth’s lifelong, smarmy psychiatrist with a covert government operation — whose deception runs deeper than either she or hard-nosed journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) could have fathomed – would prove a wrenching subplot on its own, but instead seems to distract from the compelling characters Larsson crafted in the earlier books.

Hornet’s Nest picks up right where the preceding chapter, The Girl Who Played With Fire, left off as Lisbeth is whisked into emergency brain surgery following multiple gunshot wounds at the hand of her estranged father, Alexander Zalachenko. She now faces charges of attempted murder after planting an axe in his head in self-defense. Blomkvist, meanwhile, is hard at work producing a special issue of his glossy, investigative news magazine, Millennium, devoted to exposing the corrupt environment that wrongfully institutionalized Lisbeth as an adolescent. The professional and personal spark between Blomkvist and Salander that helped make the first film, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a romantically twisted, engrossing thriller is sadly absent in Hornet’s Nest, as the dynamic duo their share their scarcest amount of screen time yet.

The majority of the story is devoted to the deterioration and exposure of The Section, a secret division of Swedish government designed to protect such clandestine goons as Soviet defector Zalachenko, and apparently make his daughter’s life a living hell in order to protect his identity. While Lisbeth spends most of the movie’s exposition recovering in an intensive care unit, Blomkvist risks both his career and his life to exonerate her and halt The Section’s ruthless exploitation of power.

He enlists the help of his sister Annika, a defense attorney, and Plague, Lisbeth’s only known friend and fellow hacker extraordinaire, to help shed a light on the injustice wreaked upon Lisbeth throughout her life. Blomkvist even smuggles a smart phone into the hospital to communicate with Lisbeth and give her an opportunity to compose her autobiography in time for her court hearing. Her sympathetic surgeon keeps insisting to the police she isn’t well enough for an interrogation, and his handy stall tactics help both Lisbeth and Blomkvist bide some time to cement their case.

In the meantime, various players within The Section discuss the liability of Zalachenko and his troublesome daughter and devise an assassination plot to eliminate both of them from the equation. When this feeble attempt implodes, The Section’s overwhelming demographic of angry, aging white men wax philosophical on Lisbeth’s tale, one going so far as to remark her life is “like a Greek tragedy.” To wit, Lisbeth’s mute, deranged, towheaded Frankenstein monster of a half-brother, Niedermann, is indeed on the loose and calculating his revenge with every silent, blood-lustful stare. His intermittent appearances remind me of a cross between Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh of No Country For Old Men and Peter Stormare’s Nordic thug in Fargo.

Director Daniel Alfredson saturates his film with talky pith that manages to simultaneously run the clock and evoke a nostalgic longing for the earlier chapters’ focus on Lisbeth and her system-bucking ethos. The climactic courtroom showdown between Lisbeth and her vile childhood therapist finally give her the spotlight, as she’s seen preparing for the trial by doing pushups in her jail cell and perfecting her mohawk with the swagger of a waifish Travis Bickle. The sequence is a welcome deviation from the plodding dialogue that seemed both sterile and repetitive in many scenes, but even at a bloated 148 minutes, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest proves a worthy enough conclusion to satisfy even the most meticulous Larsson enthusiasts.