The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest: Not Much Sting

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2010) • View trailer for The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
Three stars (out of five). Rating: R, for violence, profanity and smarmy content
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.5.10

Continuity of vision may not be essential when adapting a rigorously interlaced series of books to the big screen … but it’s certainly desirable.

The guiding hands of Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh obviously contributed to the richly textured success of all three Lord of the Rings films. And who but Francis Ford Coppola could have interwoven the two timelines of Godfather Part II so seamlessly into its predecessor?

Although accused of murder and facing the possibility of renewed
imprisonment in a psychiatric ward, Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace) refuses
to compromise the image that has served her so well ... and struts
into the courtroom in full punk regalia.

Vexingly, the Swedish film adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s Girl Who books, although made almost concurrently, are scripted by three different writers and directed by two different individuals. Daniel Alfredson, who helmed the middle installment, has returned for the final chapter in the trilogy.

I don’t understand this revolving-door approach; surely a savvy producer should have recognized the value of artistic continuity. After all, those same guiding hands were smart enough to hang onto Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist – both still in top form, as the emotionally damaged Lisbeth Salander and her hard-charging journalistic champion, Mikael Blomkvist – so why not take similar care behind the scenes?

The unhappy result of such scattershot filmmaking is the realization, now that the trilogy has concluded with The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, that Alfredson simply isn’t right for this material. His handling of this film is even less viscerally involving than the previous entry, and Ulf Ryberg’s screenplay is a discouraging disappointment: an overly talky thriller that might have been fine with a different set of characters, but not these characters, darn it!

In fairness, Larsson’s third novel is partly to blame; the author obviously suffered from a (not unreasonable) desire to wrap up his saga with exhaustive detail. But here, again, we perceive the value of more talented hands: Director Niels Arden Oplev and screenwriters Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg brilliantly condensed Larsson’s dense prose while making the first film, wisely concentrating on developing suspense and the character interplay between Lisbeth and Mikael, while downplaying Larsson’s tendency to over-write. (Let’s face it: The second hundred pages or so of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are a truly tedious slog.)

The Girl Who Played with Fire: Smoldering

The Girl Who Played with Fire (2010) • View trailer for The Girl Who Played with Fire
Four stars (out of five). Rating: R, for violence, profanity, nudity, rape and strong sexual content
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.6.10
Buy DVD: The Girl Who Played With Fire • Buy Blu-Ray: The Girl Who Played with Fire [Blu-ray]

The characters are no longer as provocatively fresh, and we've learned that Stieg Larsson's plots can be extremely nasty. 

But familiarity certainly doesn't breed contempt. Noomi Rapace's Lisbeth Salander remains one of cinema's truly great characters, and parts of The Girl Who Played with Fire are just as tense as what went down in this film's predecessor. 

Having gotten to know Lisbeth Salander quite intimately
during the events depicted in the previous film,
investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael
Nyqvist, right) refuses to believe that she could be guilty
of the three murders with which she has been charged.
Alas, investigating detective Jan Bublanski (Johan Kylen)
doesn't share Mikael's faith in the absent Lisbeth, whose
location remains unknown. To make matters worse,
Bublanski resents Mikael's tendency to embarrass the
police ... which leaves our crusading reporter to do his
own sleuthing. (Would we have it any other way?)

Perhaps even more suspenseful, since we now know that Larsson doesn't pull his punches. If no single scene in this film generates the sickening horror of Salander's rape in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it ain't for lack of effort. Bad things happen to good people here. 

That said, replacement director Daniel Alfredson simply doesn't have the snap that Niels Arden Oplev brought to the first film. Alfredson's approach is more routine, less galvanic; he doesn't exactly dilute the twisty plot or intriguing characters, but he also doesn't bring much to the party. 

Were she not so emotionally damaged and oddly vulnerable, Rapace's character could be regarded as less mortal and more iconic: a pierced, black-garbed avenging angel placed on Earth hunt down "men who hate women," as crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist, also returning) perceives her. 

The beauty of Rapace's performance, though, is the intriguing balance between human frailty and adrenaline-fueled hatred. Salander is such a tiny little thing — one wonders how she's able to handle a huge motorcycle, in one scene — that first-time acquaintances can be forgiven their assumption of weakness. But Rapace makes us believe that rage and ferocious skill trump size, particularly when she sets her mouth grimly and we watch, with both satisfaction and horror, as all humanity and compassion drain from her dark eyes. 

Aside from some quick scenes that establish the sex-traffickers who hover malignantly throughout this story, Fire begins somewhat quietly, allowing us to get a better sense of the relationships between Blomkvist, Salander and various side characters that were given short shrift in the first film. Larsson's books are dense, to say the least; while the screenwriters — Jonas Frykberg here, Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg on Tattoo — have done an impressive job of compression while retaining all the crucial bits, one can lament the missing subtleties. 

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Fiery thriller

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2010) • View trailer for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
4.5 stars (out of five). Rating: Unrated, but comparable to an R for violence, nudity, profanity, rape and strong sexual content
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.16.10
Buy DVD: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo • Buy Blu-Ray: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [Blu-ray]

The late Stieg Larsson's U.S. fans have been salivating over the prospect of seeing his debut novel on the big screen, ever since the American translation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo hit our shores in September 2008.

The wait has been worthwhile. Director Niels Arden Oplev has delivered a taut, intelligent and thoroughly absorbing adaptation of Larsson's intriguing and quite nasty thriller. Kudos, as well, go to screenwriters Rasmus Heisterberg and Nikolaj Arcel, who've done a masterful job of transforming Larsson's dense novel (480 pages!) into a 152-minute film that never, ever flags.

After realizing that their quarters have been searched in their absence -- thanks
to the perfect recall she has for the location of every object in the room --
Lisbeth (Noomi Rapace) drags Mikael (Michael Nyqvist) outside, where they
discover the tell-tale scratches of forced entry. Perversely, Lisbeth regards this
as good news: The bad guys are getting nervous...

Although the literary world has given us a wealth of gripping thrillers and mystery novels during the past several decades, the genre has been woefully under-represented on American movie screens ... that is to say, in a manner that does justice to the original books. Hollywood adaptations of such stories are invariably superficial and additionally compromised by the reflexive need for the high-power wattage of movie stars, and their presence always wrecks the gritty integrity of the source novel.

We've had to rely on foreign filmmakers for adaptations that are true to the atmosphere of the written word. Roman Polanski's current handling of Robert Harris' The Ghost Writer is a marvelous drama: grim fiction by way of familiar real-world newspaper headlines. And I still have very fond memories of French director/scripter Guillaume Canet's sensational 2006 adaptation of Harlan Coben's Tell No One, without question one of the best mystery thrillers ever brought to the big screen.

Even French director Bernard Tavernier's 2009 interpretation of James Lee Burke's In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead — shortened to In the Electric Mist when filmed — is an intriguing effort, despite its flaws. How can one not appreciate the perfect casting of Tommy Lee Jones as Burke's world-weary Dave Robicheaux?

To this list we must add Oplev's adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, highlighted by another example of perfect casting: Noomi Rapace's utterly mesmerizing performance as the damaged and deliciously complex title character, Lisbeth Salander.

You won't quickly forget her. Which is as it should be.