The first sequel The Girl Who Played With Fire was bad, ditching the harsh if heightened realism from the first movie in favor of a silly conspiracy plot with a scarred supervillain and his hulking sidekick. That was a depressing drop off in quality, but at least it was still exciting. The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest clears up all of the holes left open in the ongoing story, but little else. Our hero Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace) is relegated to a hospital bed and a courtroom for most of the film. Renegade magazine editor Mikael (Michael Nyqvist) is still out hunting down bad guys, but since most of them were either killed in the last movie or in the opening minutes of this one, he doesn’t have much left to do. Instead the film is primarily dedicated to characters sitting in chairs and explaining the plot to the audience. It’s about as boring as it sounds and with a 2.5 hour running time will test your patience and your bladder.
Wrapping up any mystery/thriller is a challenge. The hunt is always more exciting than the destination, so the filmmakers had a tough job ahead of them. Unfortunately all the answers were either spelled out or intimated by the end of the last movie, so now all that could be done was connect the dots and punish the bad guys. It’s pretty tedious, convoluted stuff and since all the villains are elderly it doesn’t exactly build to exciting chase and capture sequences. Lead actors Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist are still strong and have deservedly achieved international notoriety for these roles, but sadly just don’t have much to do this time out. The whole movie feels like an epilogue with the cast and crew simply going through the motions to give the audience a conclusion. Even when Lisbeth finally dons her full punk/goth outfit in what should be an exciting character climax, the costume is so over the top and outdated that it will only provoke laughter.
It’s a shame that this series has ended with a wimper instead of a bang. But as disappointing as the sequels turned out to be, they don’t tarnish the effectiveness of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. They simply confirm that the film was little more than a well-executed piece of trashy entertainment and not the start of an epic saga as the marketing suggested. Hopefully David Fincher will be smart enough to only adapt the first film for Hollywood. It feels complete unto itself and doesn’t need these drawn out sequels. Perhaps the books are better, but somehow I doubt it. The plot is the worst thing about the sequels and their jagged uncinematic story structure suggests that they slavishly follow the original novels as fan service. See The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and pretend the story ends there. It’s not worth the pain of slogging through these unnecessary additions.
