Review: The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest (2009)

* * *
Director: Daniel Alfredson
Starring: Noomi Rapace, Mikael Nyqvist

It's over! The first round of films based on Stieg Larsson's Millennium series comes to an end, which means it's time to say goodbye to Noomi Rapace's version of Lisbeth Salander. All in all, I think The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest is a decent end to the series, not really in the same league as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo but an improvement over The Girl Who Played With Fire.

This one picks up where the last left off, with Lisbeth (Rapace) and Zalachenko (Georgi Staykov) being rushed to the hospital to treat the critical injuries they've sustained at each other's hands. Lisbeth is quickly charged with attempted murder and The Section, the secret government agency that has been working with Zalachenko since his defection from the Soviet Union, works to cover his tracks and keep their existence under wraps. Zalachenko is less than willing to cooperate, however, which quickly leads to his death and an attempt to kill Lisbeth. Failing this attempt, The Section's plan is to have Lisbeth committed and placed in the "care" of Dr. Telleborian (Anders Ahlbom), her childhood psychiatrist, and discredit and/or kill Mikael Blomkvist (Mikael Nyqvist) in order to keep him from revealing all their secrets.

Mikael's plan is, of course, to blow The Section out of the water and reveal the extent to which Lisbeth has been victimized by the state. He has plenty of documents, obtained through Lisbeth and one of her hacker pals, and enlists his sister, Annika (Annika Hallin), to represent Lisbeth at her trial. His persistence on Libseth's behalf makes him a target, but also makes the other members of the Millennium staff targets and his tunnel vision ultimately leads to issues with his business partner and sometime lover Erika (Lena Endre), who begins to believe that he doesn't care who gets hurt as long as he can vindicate Lisbeth. You can see her point but, at the same time, you can understand where Mikael's coming from given that Lisbeth is the kind of character who would rather to suffer the worst of consequences than go to the trouble of helping anyone to help her. The story's primary concern is with giving the bad guys their comeupance, but it is also about Lisbeth, so damaged and bitter, learning how to trust people.

Like its immediate predecessor, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest doesn't have the ambition of the first film or the book series, but I found that less problematic here than I did in The Girl Who Played With Fire. I think this is partly because Hornet's Nest was my least favourite of the books, and therefore I wasn't expecting too much from the film version, and also because this film isn't as violent as the other two. Part of the problem I had with the second film is that I felt it removed the violence from its context, reducing the events to violence for the sake of violence. Hornet's Nest doesn't have that problem, which is very much to its credit.

The screenplay by Ulf Ryberg trims a lot of fat from the novel, allowing for the film to unfold at a quick and engaging pace. This particular part of the trilogy has an uphill battle from the outset simply because its most dynamic element, Lisbeth, is out of commission and relegated to the sidelines for much of the plot. Ryberg and director Daniel Alfredson manage to put the pieces together in such a way that Lisbeth's absence isn't so glaring and they give Rapace enough to work with that it doesn't feel like the film is wasting her presence.

The film ends on a quiet note - a scene between Lisbeth and Mikael that acknowledges their complicated history and suggests a possible future - that brings a sense of relief to the viewer. After everything the characters have been through over the course of three films, it's nice to think that they may finally get to know the joy of an uneventful weekend at home.

Review: The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009)

* * 1/2
Director: Daniel Alfredson
Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist

Man, I wanted so much to like this movie. I loved the film version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (even more than the book, in fact) and The Girl Who Played with Fire was my favourite of the books, but I just was not feeling this adaptation. It retains the action from the novel but lacks the thematic ambition of both its source and its predecessor film, resulting in a rather generic action thriller.

Noomi Rapace is back as Lisbeth Salander, anti-social computer hacker and trouble magnet. About a year has passed since the events in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Lisbeth has been enjoying her embezzled money on a beach in the Caribbean, having abruptly disappeared without a word to any of the people in her life. When she returns to Sweden and sets about re-establishing some of her former connections she’s met with disdain by some, knowing amusement by others, and fear by her legal guardian Bjurman (Peter Andersson), whom she visits in the middle of the night to warn him against trying to have that tattoo she gave him in the first story removed. This visit sets off a chain reaction which results in three deaths, a manhunt for Lisbeth, and the re-emergence of Zalachenko (Georgi Staykov), a dangerous man from her past.

While Lisbeth is evading capture by the police and hunting down Zalachenko to take care of their unfinished business, her friend and former lover Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) tackles the issue of trying to prove that she's innocent of the three murders. One of the victims was Blomkvist’s colleague who was working with his girlfriend (another of the victims) to expose a large scale sex trafficking ring and the high profile men who took advantage of it. Zalachenko’s name pops up again and again in the investigation materials, leading Blomkvist to believe that he’s set Lisbeth up, a belief which is solidified when he uncovers the link between the two as well as Zalachenko’s ties to the Swedish secret police.

If you’ve been in a book store in the last year or so, you’ve no doubt seen Stieg Larsson’s books and their daunting density (though have no fear: their size is partly due to Larsson’s fixation on the minutiae of his characters’ lives which includes descriptions of Lisbeth’s shopping trips to Ikea and her reliance on a Swedish culinary delicacy known as Billy’s Pan Pizza). The plot as it is set out in the novel is dense but that’s because it examines things from multiple angles, following both Lisbeth and Blomkvist, but also following the police investigation from the inside, exploring the network of assorted bad guys, and using all of these threads to continue the examination of institutionalized misogyny that began in the previous story. One of the weaknesses of the film is that it drops most of the stuff involving the police investigation and entirely abandons the part of the plot dealing with how the press twists the story to sensationalistic extremes in order to vilify Lisbeth. The film presents a very streamlined version of the plot, which isn’t a problem in and of itself (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was streamlined as well), but it’s done rather inelegantly here and much of The Girl Who Played with Fire feels like it’s just setting the stage for what will happen in the next film. I won’t fault the film for its abrupt, non-resolution ending since one scene essentially straddles the second and third book, but I do fault it for the perfunctory way that it goes about establishing story elements and characters that will carry over to the next film and for the way that it seems to de-contextualize the violence. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was extremely violent as well (arguably even more brutally so than this one) but it used that violence as part of its exploration of the relationship of women to society, whereas here it feels more like violence for the sake of violence, events that are isolated rather than woven into the larger picture.

That’s what disappointed me about the film, but there were things that I liked about it as well. Rapace turns in another great performance as Lisbeth, particularly in the scene where Lisbeth and Zalachenko finally come face to face. She’s such an emotionally remote character, never registering much in the way of a change in demeanour, but in that scene she just can’t contain her glee at seeing the lingering effects of the injury she inflicted on him. The way that Rapace and Staykov play off of each other is note perfect and illuminates another side of Lisbeth, helping to more fully develop the character. Of course shortly thereafter things go horribly, horribly wrong for her but her singular determination to definitively settle the score with Zalachenko allows her to literally dig herself out of the situation. She’s a force to be reckoned with and, once again, Rapace is totally up to the task of playing her (and looks pretty cool kicking ass, riding motorcycles, and psychologically terrorizing some bad, bad dudes). I just wish that the film had a little bit more depth.

Review: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2009)

* * * *
Director: Niels Arden Opley
Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist

4 stars hardly seems adequate to sum up how I feel about this movie. This adaptation of the first part of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy is an absolutely spellbinding film and its protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, is one of the most compelling and fascinating characters to come along in quite a while. The film is already set for a totally unnecessary Stateside remake, which I think will prove problematic not only in terms of casting but also content, as the forthright, unflinching way that the film deals with violence is one of its most startling features.

There's a lot of plot to this story, but I'll sum it up as best I can and without giving much away. It opens with a libel verdict against Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) for a story he published in his magazine Millennium. In a few months he will begin serving his prison term and in the interim he's approached by Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), who wants to hire him to investigate the disappearance of his niece, Harriet. Henrik believes that Harriet was murdered by a member of the family so that they could secure a greater part of the Vanger fortune and on the surface it appears that his suspicions are on point. Despite the fact that they all hate each other, the family lives together on an island accessible only by a bridge to the mainland. The day of Harriet's disappearance there was an accident on the bridge that would have made it impossible for Harriet to come into contact with anyone outside the family. The case has been cold for 40 years and Mikael settles in to wade through boxes and boxes of evidence that Henrik has collected over the years, determined but nevertheless doubtful about his possibilities of success.

Back in Stockholm a computer hacker named Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) closely monitors Blomkvist's progress and cracks the code that has Blomkvist and the police baffled. She sends her findings to Blomkvist and joins him on the island where they uncover more clues and discover that they aren't just investigating the disappearance of one girl, but a series of murders that have taken place in the towns surrounding the island. The closer they get to the truth, the bigger the targets on their backs become and soon they aren't just going through evidence anymore, but dodging bullets as well.

Directed by Niels Arden Opley The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is sometimes unrelentingly brutal in terms of its violence and definitely not for the faint of heart. That being said, the violence (particularly the sexual violence, of which there is much) is not exploitative. It isn't "torture porn" constructed around a visual aesthetic that foregrounds the forbidden pleasure of looking; it's grim and harrowing and the camera refuses to look away from it, becoming less voyeur than witness. The Swedish title of the film is actually Men Who Hate Women and there's a strong current of misogyny that runs through the story, by which I mean that the film acknowledges and is critical of misogyny, not that it is itself misogynist. On the contrary the film is actually ferociously feminist and it frames both the violence and the mindset that inspires it as unequivocally vile. There is a moment between Lisbeth and Mikael towards the end in which she advises him against reasoning that the killer is also a victim, tacitly acknowledging a hard reality: Mikael is a target because he's too close to the truth; Lisbeth is a target because she's too close to the truth, but could also become a target simply by being a woman in the general proximity of the killer. The film sees misogyny as a disease and its sufferers as having no place in society.

The film isn't perfect in terms of how it unravels its mystery, giving away maybe a little too much a little too soon, but it is still wholly engrossing. A big part of that is due to Lisbeth and the way that she's played by Rapace. There is a flatness to the way that she experiences the people and world around her which suggests Asperger's (the film never directly addresses this but it's my understanding that the books do), but there is also a simmering intensity that can, and occassionally does, explode. The performance always hits just the right notes and the missing beats in the way that Lisbeth interacts with others makes for some hilariously awkward moments between her and Mikael, offering a brief respite from the story's overall darkness. It's a great performance and the film is more than equal to it. The only downside is that now I have to wait for the second and third parts.