Ten Statements About....THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST (2009)

Yes...Noomi Rapace remembers 1980's movie punk fashion.

1) Unlike with the previous film in this trilogy, the gimmick of keeping our hero and heroine separated save for two instances works--the film gives us concrete reasons why Lisbeth and Mikael are on their own here.

2) I do like the way that, over the course of these three movies, the roles established for our heroes are flipped until, by this film, Mikael is the leg man--he even interacts with Plague, just as Lisbeth did.

3) Was there really a point to keeping Neidermann around? He wasn't a compelling character in ...Played With Fire, and helped move the film away from the harder, harsher realism of the first film. Every time he shows his lumpen face, I wanted to fast forward through the scene, and his ultimate fate came as an anticlimax.

4) I am relieved that Rapace got back in touch with the intensity she has in ...Dragon Tattoo. Even though she does little in the movie--she barely talks through long stretches of it--we know what's going on in her head. And even though we begin to see a softening of her (there comes to be almost a flitatious air towards her interactions with Dr. Jonassen), we never lose sight of what Lisbeth is at her core.

5) Even though we still get that international thriller flavor of ...Hornet's Nest (Hell, the last two films pretty much make up one long story), the tone works a bit better, mainly because the sex trafficking angle is nowhere to be seen.

6) I was a little startled by how little screen time Bublanski got given how he was built up in ....Hornet's Nest. But then, I rather liked the pair of investigators who take the place of Bublanski (particularly the female half, who I almost suspected had a thing for Mikael).

"Mess with me, and I'll legal your ass..."

7) On the other hand, this is the most we see of the other Millenium cast--and we finally get some flesh on that bare bones storyline about Mikael's romance with Erika, thus making her into a living, breathing human being for the first time. And I love how Mikael's sister is almost as much a hero in this movie as Mikael and Lisbeth.

8) Even though the international thriller aspect is here to stay with the whole Section storyline, I like the fact that this case is cracked open by good ol' fashioned detective work. Even though there are some arbitrary action sequences, it's obvious they're there as a sop.



"...and then I was the bassist for A Flock of Seagulls..."



9) I'm even somewhat surprised that I don't find That Damned Sequence from ...Dragon Tattoo as much. It's a key part of the resolution to the trial, and it's not gone over nearly as much as in ...Hornet's Nest.

10) The ending is just so...non-commital. But then, that might be the point, that life isn't so neat and tidy, and not everything is resolved. And trust me, I know exactly how that very last scene would work when the third film is made.

Overall...so much better than that messed-up, all over the place second film that gives me renewed hope for Rapace's career.

Ten Statements About....THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE (2009)

"Woke up one morning/And got myself a gun..."

"Thank You For Being My Friend."

1) While I understand the impulse of taking the gimmick of the first hour of the previous film and create an entire film where our heroes never meet until the end, it doesn't quite work. The chemisty between Rapace and Nyqvist was strong enough for us to bull through ...Dragon Tattoo's slower bits, and that chemistry is gone here. Besides, it simply makes little sense for Lisbeth not to reach out to Mikael sooner. Yes, she finds it difficult to make lasting friendships, but we see she's capable of doing so both in the previous film and here....

2) Even though I swore they mentioned her previous guardian as dying, I liked the inclusion of Holger Palmgren in this film. Not only does his inclusion allows for the splitting of The Great Gobs of Exposition in this movie, it allows us to see a different side of Lisbeth--you definitely get the impression that she has a great deal of affection and love for this old man, and may even look upon him as a father figure. That being said...

3) There's way too many new POV characters. We spend so much time with Miriam and Paolo and Bublanski and Dag and so on that the two people who are supposed to be the heros of this film series are diminished. But at least Mikael gets to do some digging; for a very long stretch all Lisbeth gets to do is sit and either look intensely at a laptop or stare at a television screen.

Why am I not surprised that Lisbeth Salander
is a Yankees fan?

4) There were moments early on where I thought Bublanski was going to be an interesting character, someone who would be Lt. Jacoby to Mikael and Lisbeth's composite Peter Gunn. But then he fades into the background and doesn't give up any of the life we thought he'd contribute to this film.

5) The film noir feel of ....Dragon Tattoo seems to have been replaced by a sort of international thriller vibe...and it doesn't work as well.

6) Is it just me...or is the whole sex trafficking angle dropped whole towards the end of the second act?

7) I do like the fact that we get a little more sense of Millenium as a working magazine, and the small scenes of Mikael acting as a sort of mentor to Dag works to give him a better sense of a life prior to these movies.



"I must break you...."



8) I honestly have no idea how Lisbeth escapes the trap the villain puts her in...oh, I know how she drags herself out of where he puts her in, but I have no idea how she survives being shot multiple times. So much of that last ten minutes is very hazy for me. And speaking of the villains....

9) They seemed, quite frankly, to have wandered in off the set of a spy movie--which is partially why the film noir feel is gone. And by giving the henchman what amounts to a super-power--and no real personality beyond said super-power--leeches away some of the verisimilitude of the first film.

10) That damned sequence from ....Dragon Tattoo. Do I understand why we needed to revisit it, so that we can tie up one of the loose ends and simultaneously use it as an entry into the new adventure? Sure. Did we really need to relive it a number of times, including flashbacks to the previous films? I don't think so.

Overall...I'll be the first to admit that it would've been difficult to live up to the standards of the first film in this trilogy, but I was shocked at how dissatisfying this one was--especially given how much information designed to flesh out the mythology of this series is given out. Hopefully, the final film will rise above this falter.

Ten Statements About....THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2009)

Make no mistake about it...this girl will fuck you up.

1) The brilliance of this film is how it is at its core a true hardboiled detective mystery with its central detective split into two. Even more brilliant is how what we assume would be the qualities for a male and female detective team are switched--it's the male who works on intuition and is the partner in jeopardy, while the female does the number crunching and clue digging, and is the muscle...

2) And in keeping with its status as a hardboiled mystery, the mystery Mikael and Lisbeth uncover is not the mystery they--well, Mikael--were hired to solve. That mystery is solved off-panel, in a way that is almost off-handed but manages to give us what most hardboiled mysteries lack--a genuinely happy ending.

3) You know, I've made some noise in previous Ten Statements about the unlikelihood of the romantic relationships in some films where there's a notable age difference. Well...here it actually works, thanks in part to the performance and chemistry between Michael Nyqvist's Mikael and Noomi Rapace's Lisbeth. And while I'm not sure if this is the strength of the script or the source material, it works precisely because it's so problematic to the two leads; when Lisbeth admits to her mother toward the end 'Yes, there is someone...but you never fall in love," you know she's lying a little bit, and you know she's actually happy with it because their feelings emerged organically.

4) I really have to wonder if the American remake will have the courage to keep the two leads separate for over an hour of their film's running time. If they choose not to, it'll be a shame--one of the reasons I was engaged during that hour was trying to figure out how their two stories would intersect. And speaking of that American remake...

5) It continued to strike me throughout how easy it will be to adapt this for American audiences. The only thing that doesn't translate well is the whole probationary subplot that takes up part of the first act. Hell, even the setting has an uncannily accurate analog here in the islands off of Seattle. Although I'll admit I kept seeing Liam Neeson and Faruzia Balik in the place of Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara.

See this plotline?  It will never be mentioned again...

6) I know Rapace already has Sherlock Holmes: Book of Shadows in the can...but please, Lord, prevent her from going down the Casey Mulligan Road. This woman is too, too good an actress, with an intensity that seems to suck the light away from the air around her, to be reduced to just another cookie-cutter ingenue.

　

7) I know people are going to ask about my thought concerning the probationary subplot....I recognize that it's essential to establishing Lisbeth's moral code and gives us a clue as to the trauma in her background....but it's extremely uncomfortable to watch, and I can't imagine it making it to the American version.

8) I am so grateful that the American release of this film went with the title of the novel, as the Swedish title would have tipped off the viewer to a major plot point....

This man is going to regret doing this to Lisbeth in about
fifteen minutes time....

9) Oddly enough--given how so many critics talk about the violence being extreme, the only real violence we see is from the above mentioned probationary subplot. We see a lot of aftermath (one sequence, where Mikael and Lisbeth are brought to the scene of a long-ago crime, and as the camera moves with them we see the actual body as it was found back in the 50's is both beautiful and chilling), but the rest is done very subtlely...another thing I worry might be out the window come the American version.

10) If there is a flaw, it's in the sketchiness of Mikael's background. There's an implied relationship with a co-worker, some other stuff about his career...but nothing else. His history is so weak that when he mentions he's divorced at one point, I was actually shocked.

Overall...a very powerful film that serves as a legitimate noir mystery, centered around a credible team of investigators and a truly viscous performance by Rapace.

This DVD also contained a number of trailers, including one for the sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire. The one that truly surprised me, and makes me curious to see it, is OSS-117: Lost In Rio, apparently a spy spoof set in 1960's Cuba featuring a clueless secret agent that looks like stupid fun.