The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

Directed by Daniel Alfredson

(R)

*

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This would-be thriller from Sweden “feels very much like the concluding chapter it is,” said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. As fans of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels wait for the popular trilogy to be adapted by an American director, the Nordic version of the finale arrives offering “neatly tied loose ends” and very little drama after its first moments. In the opening scene, the series’ damaged heroine, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), is being airlifted to a hospital after being shot by her father and buried alive. Having suffered abuse at the hands of various men throughout her life, Lisbeth seems “finally in a position to get justice,” said Tasha Robinson in the A.V. Club. Yet she spends most of the film merely stewing in the hospital or a jail cell. With its most arresting character on the sidelines, “the story lacks a center.” Larsson’s third book had the same problem, said David Edelstein in New York. Preoccupied with “marginal details” related to action from the earlier installments, the film moves as slowly as “one of those long Scandinavian winter nights.”