Larsson's latest lacks sting

Director: Daniel Alfredson

Stars: Noomi Rapace, Michael Nyqvist

Screening: Greater Union Newcastle, Tuggerah, Avoca, Ettalong

Rating: **

Thefinal film in the trilogy adapted from the best-selling Millennium books by Swedish author Stieg Larsson picks up precisely where the second instalment – The Girl Who Played With Fire – left off.

Some 145 minutes later Lisbeth Salander’s secret torment is finally over.

And so is ours, after what proves to be a plodding, dull and only occasionally exciting conclusion to what began as a compelling, bracing, exotic crime saga.

First things first: don’t even think about going to see The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest if you haven’t watched the first two movies.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo introduced us last year to the strikingly intense Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth, the heavily pierced and dragon-tattooed Goth computer hacker.

That film was a thrilling, chilling cold-case whodunit powered by an unlikely but compelling detective duo in the bisexual and anti-social delinquent Lisbeth and crusading Stockholm journalist Mikael Blomqvist (played by Michael Nyqvist).

Follow-up The Girl Who Played With Fire was an equally dark, violent and gripping mystery – right up until the preposterous moment bullet-riddled Lisbeth’s bloodied hand came clawing up out of her shallow grave.

This third instalment opens with Lisbeth in hospital recovering from the bullet wound to the head inflicted by her estranged father, the disfigured former Soviet spy Alexander Zalachenko.

Just down the intensive-care ward corridor, her vile old man is recovering from the axe wound that Lisbeth inflicted with maximum prejudice.

That both father and daughter have survived their bloody confrontation at the end of the last movie is a worry for the hush-hush group of retired secret service agents who have devoted their lives to keeping Zalachenko’s defection – and subsequent crimes – a state secret.

They immediately set about conspiring to have Lisbeth returned to lock-down in a psychiatric institution and her only champion, the middle-aged investigative reporter Blomqvist, discredited or, better yet, dispatched.

Can the hero journo uncover evidence to prove that an elaborate government cover-up stretching back decades has almost destroyed Lisbeth’s life?

The structure of the plot this time around – with Lisbeth in hospital and then in a cell awaiting her competency trial while Blomqvist pounds the pavement digging up the past with his Millennium magazine colleagues – severely limits the amount of screen time the two main characters share.

That definitely takes the edge off – the fire of their uneasy partnership and unspoken loyalty never really burning as strongly as it did in the first film.

Expect some suspense and a few flares of emotion in the climactic courtroom drama as Lisbeth stares down the sicko shrink who traumatised her during her teenage years in a psychiatric ward.

And there’s something to be said for seeing all the loose ends tied up nice and tight – bondage, of course, being just one of Stieg Larsson’s twisted specialities.

But here’s hoping the upcoming Hollywood remake by Se7en and The Social Network director David Fincher (starring part-time 007 Daniel Craig as Blomqvist and Rooney Mara as Lisbeth) is more like the first of the Swedish trilogy and not The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest.