Sweden. - Julian Assange is being accused of sexual molestation in that country and "hacktivists" are trying to paralyse the likes of Mastercard and Visa for withdrawing support from his WikiLeaks.
More importantly, however, hacker and sexual victim Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) is fighting for her life after surviving a night underground with a bullet in her head, among others.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is the final episode of the Millennium trilogy, based on the late Stieg Larsson's airport thrillers which, in cinematic terms, started off well and, like most sequels, deteriorated rapidly. Here we are scraping the bottom of the barrel beneath the icy, dirty waters of Oslo.
Lisbeth is going to spend much of the movie recovering in hospital, where she responds blankly to the kind of doctor who comes around once in a, well, millennium. Played by I don't know who because the Internet Movie Database doesn't provide a photograph or his title as a clue, all I know is he's one of those kind, level-headed European doctors who will not get even the slightest glimpse of gratitude from madam, who has rapidly used up all of her sympathy quota.
Meanwhile, a lot of old men with Nazi links have endless meetings about how she must be stopped and re-committed to the loony bin, where she was clearly abused by another doctor, another old man.
And then there is the ever-persistent journalist Michael Nyqvist (Mikhael Blomkvist) and his editor and on/off partner Erika Berger (the beautiful Lena Endre), working tirelessly for Lisbeth via his ego.
Yes, there is a lot of atmosphere in the film. We constantly wonder when Lisbeth, Erika, Michael or his pregnant sister, another nameless wonder for the same above reasons, are going to be taken out by some awful Eastern Europeans on those grim, wintry streets.
There is exactly one action sequence and that's when one of the latter almost succeeds in killing Michael in a restaurant. But that, apart from Lisbeth's surly giant of a half-brother who goes around psychopathing everyone, is about it.
The whole thing is going to build towards a court case in which all the old fogeys are relying on the fact that, up to now, Lisbeth has refused to open her mouth in her own defence. And guess what she's going to do in court? Why, she's going to open it, and she's going to show us just how good she is at semantics.
Most absurd of all is that Michael's sister is going to defend Lisbeth. Maybe they don't have conflict-of-interest practices in Sweden, but I very much doubt it. Still, it's very nice seeing Michael looking upon Lisbeth altruistically in the dock in her full black punk regalia, having provided his sister with most of the information they need, and she about to pop a baby just to give it all that extra frisson.
Obviously they win - but does Lisbeth look relieved, happy, grateful? not on your nelly - and by now we are way past the two-hour mark and my Hitchcockian bladder is bursting and I actually have to get to work of the paying variety, but Lisbeth has one more thing to do.
She has to go to a remote barn in the country where her half-brother is hiding out and he, well, I suppose he tosses her about for the benefit of those who like that sort of thing until he ends up hanging from that hook we're shown as she enters, but I can't be sure because by then I'd left for the above reasons and because this franchise was now ready for what Rowan Atkinson calls glorious television.
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