Annika Hallin and Noomi Rapace in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

The firebrand caged, then released

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest shows the Dragon Tattoo stories (officially, the Millennium Trilogy) running out of steam. This time the "girl" of the stories, Lisbeth Salandar, Steig Larsson's feisty young survivor of abuse (who gives back as good as she got), is relatively passive through much of the movie. Her violent encounter with her dad and a nasty Russian has left them all three in the hospital. When she recovers from a bullet to the head and other injuries, she's hauled off to prison. Much of the action transpires in a courtroom where she is successfully defended against those who would lock Lisbeth in a mental ward as she was as a teenager. It doesn't work. Her chief enemy in court is shown not only to have no hard evidence to justify putting Lisbeth away again, but to have a computer full of downloaded junk showing that he's a pedophile. He's a pathetic loser, no real opponent. We'd feel sorry for him were he not such a total slimebag. All Lisbeth has to do is sit there with her Mohawk and full leather regalia (Swedish prison regulations are liberal) and watch the defense, prepared by her advocates from Millennium magazine, demolish him.

Lisbeth is immediately set free, and we know what's going to happen: more mayhem. And its about time. All we get to see before that is plotting by an intelligence splinter group that is out to get her, a shooting in the hospital, and lots of scenes of Lisbeth texting or phoning an ally and working out in her hospital bed with exercise rubber bands and such. Now we can finally watch her do her violent thing. She has to put away that wicked blond giant, and she does so neatly by sending the evil bikers after him, and then informing the cops.

Millennium Trilogy Part 3 has a lot of exposition, a thing that burdens every film in the series drawn from the three books by Steig Larsson. Popular though these have become, Larsson was not a professional novelist. He was a journalist who was interested in exposing the crimes of extremist groups and the abuse of women. The books are lengthy, elaborate potboilers, and he wrote them for his own amusement, after work. They were all published posthumously after his sudden death (of a heart attack) at the age of fifty. In the film version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it's all new, presuming, that is, you haven't read the novels, which of course many have. Judging by the enormous worldwide success of the novels, Steig Larsson knew what he was doing. And knew what would appeal to the public. Art was not called for, just breathless non-stop storytelling. Nothing like a trilogy about rape, sadistic abuse of women and right wing racist organizations (with a little lesbianism on the side) to warm the hearts of readers and moviegoers. But it's harder to cram all this into a movie than it is to put it in a 600-page novel, and the films, with their various writers and two directors (Niels Arden Oplev for the first and Daniel Alfredson for the second and third), never rise above the level of workmanlike.

There has been a multiple-episode Swedish TV series (also starring the excellent Noomi Rapace and Mikael Blomkvist). And that may be more suitable, really, because obviously this is a story idea that doesn't want to quit. It is essentially a premise, a back-story, with a series of episodes, with no grand narrative arc or any particular resolution (as is shown by the lame and tame finale of Hornet's Nest, where Lisbeth and Mikael meet one more time and just say, more or less, "See you around."). What appeals most in the series is simply the character of Ms. Salandar, memorably embodied on film by Rapace, who is mysteriously both off-putting and appealing, repellent and cool with her big tattoo, her lesbian snarl, her aggressive punk style and ace computer hacking skills. You know she's dangerous and damaged, but you want to hug or pet her like an abused dog, or maybe a pet Iguana. Frankly, though, it's daunting to know that Larsson left three quarters of a fourth novel written with plans for a fifth and sixth and an overall scheme of ten novels. Enough, already!

These are stories with a compulsive page-turner quality (from what people say anyway), but in the manner of potboilers, artless and unselfconsciously busy -- the kind of stuff Daniel Defoe turned out that's all forgotten other than Plague Year, Moll Flanders, and Robinson Crusoe. When you think about it, three classics is terrific, but not a sign of great control considering Defoe turned out around 500 books. The Millennium Trilogy might seem to have hit it the first time, but we cant say these are on a par with Robinson Crusoe. The series has more than its fair share of repetition and reiteration. We get the idea. Lisbeth was abused by her father and her government-appointed guardians. It made her mean. We are reminded of this over and over and over -- and by the time of Hornet's Nest, there's not much left to reveal, though sure enough, we get another gruesome peek at her abuse. And then, she got revenge, first on her father, of course, and then on her cruel guardian. Along the way, especially in the more richly plotted first and second parts, we hear about a lot of right wing extremists and general all-purpose creeps. Now can we move on?

No, we can't, because the trilogy is going to be remade in Hollywood, with Rooney Mara (Mark Zuckerberg's ex-girlfriend in Fincher's The Social Network) as Lisbeth and Daniel Craig as the investigative journalist who helps her, Michael Nyqvist (Mikael Blomkvist in the Swedish films). Will this be any better, or even much different? It won't be in Swedish, and maybe, though it's hard to imagine it, there will be more violence, as in the surprisingly faithful, but louder version of the Swedish teenage vampire love story Let the Right One In, which has the (appropriately, for America?) more egocentric title of Let Me In. Let Me In is a good film. It misses a lot of the subtlety and mournful wistfulness of the original, and strangely, is less scary at key moments. But it's well done, and it's in English. That's probably the most you can hope for from Hollywood's remake of the Millennium Trilogy.

Luftslottet som sprängde (the original title, which means something like "The Castle of Air that Blew Up") was released in Sweden, Norway and Denmark in November 2009, in limited release in the US and Canada from October 29, 2010.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.