Author Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy” draws to a close with The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, director Daniel Alfredson’s (who also directed the second film of the trilogy) adaptation of the phenomenally bestselling novels. The first film, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was a masterpiece, a taut and thrilling crime procedural fronted by the mesmerizing Lisbeth Salander, one of the all-time great screen heroines. The second film, The Girl who Played with Fire, stumbled both aesthetically and narratively, veering into gratuitous implausibility (cartoonishly deformed mega-villains with hulking German superman sidekicks incapable of feeling pain), which this final installment has no choice but to exploit. But it does so with the sort of gritty realism evident in the first film—a fine return to form.

Left for dead at the end of Fire, Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace) fights for both her life and her freedom when a secret cabal of government officials plots to take advantage of her incapacitated state by accusing her of multiple murders. But if there’s one role the ferociously independent Lisbeth Salander has never rolled over and taken, it’s that of scapegoat. The more her enemies conspire to destroy her, the harder she and crusading journalist and magazine publisher Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) fight back.

Hornet’s Nest takes its own sweet time making Lisbeth Lisbeth again. And thank goodness for it. With three bullets in her body, including one in her skull, the film doesn’t try to rush her recovery, but allows for a believable physical and mental recuperative process. We watch the sullen and mostly wordless Lisbeth rebuild herself from a shattered wreck into the mohawked, black leather-clad badass with whom we fell so madly in love—and awe—in the first film. This evolution is one of the film’s most pleasurable aspects, a delicious example of delayed gratification. Across the arc of the trilogy, actress Noomi Rapace delivers one of the most memorable and gratifying performances of the year.

Though it is not initially clear in the first or even the second film, the real lead in the trilogy is Mikael Blomkvist. He is the true center of the films, a champion for truth and righteousness who wields his leftist magazine like a fearsome broadsword. Both he and the actor who plays him cannot help it if a goth, bisexual avenging angel is simply more compelling and fun than a dogged middle-aged journalist. If Dragon Tattoo revealed Blomkvist at his most vulnerable, Hornet’s Nest divulges his mettle—he is determined, in the face of omnipresent jeopardy, to vindicate his friend, an act of selflessness all the more admirable given her apparent rejection and ambivalence of him.

Other than the leftover villains from the second film, the film’s baddies this time around are a secret sect of rogue spies in Sweden’s intelligence service. The film employs an almost 1970’s-era conspiracy thriller approach, evoking the sort of Illuminati-esque paranoia normally reserved for films such as The DaVinci Code. The only difference is, rather than keeping this nefarious faction hidden in the shadows, Hornet’s Nest allows us to study them in intimate detail. What makes this overexposure so satisfying is that they are all elderly men, riddled with infirmity and disease. The film understands perfectly that even evil men grow old, an obvious but rarely acknowledged admission. We prefer to imagine their wickedness matching their vigor. They may look like your sweet old grandpa, but evil is indifferent to age.

Mercilessly dark and long (2 ½ hours), it’s amazing the mostly talk and very little action Hornet’s Nest is as compelling as it is. But director Alfredson takes a page from the first installment of the trilogy and makes this finale more about following clues than personalities. Jacob Groth’s taut musical score drives the film to a terrific dénouement where a trilogies’ worth of seemingly disconnected characters and random plot points merge into an utterly satisfying climax. The bar for director David Fincher’s upcoming English-language adaptation has been set very high.

© Copyright 2010 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.

Directed by Daniel Alfredson
Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist, Lena Endre, Annika Hallin, Per Oscarsson, Peter Andersson, Jacob Ericksson, Mirja Turestedt, Anders Ahlbom Rosendahl
Rated R for strong violence, some sexual material, and brief language.
Running Time: 148 minutes