Entertainment

‘Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest’ looks fierce, has no sting

The “Millennium tril ogy” — I think it’s called that because the three movies are about a thousand minutes long — staggers to a close with the world’s longest epilogue, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.”

This series of Swedish movies, based on Stieg Larsson’s best sellers, started to go wrong in the second hour of the first film, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” It took a turn toward the absurd with the sequel, “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” and now puts the cap on this gusher of stupidity with the final film, 2½ hours of rehash, anticlimax and so what. Expunging the clichés, coincidences, flat dialogue and dull exposition will present a challenge for director David Fincher as he begins to remake the films in Hollywood.

Our makeup-and-hair-product-fetishizing hero, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), lies near death after trying (but failing) to kill her KGB-connected abusive daddy. Her friend and former lover, crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) rushes to get her story out in his magazine, Millennium, before she can be convicted of attempted murder. Yet if he has evidence he could present to the court, it would appear to be irrelevant whether the magazine actually gets printed.

Meanwhile, the lurching assassin Niedermann, who is capable neither of feeling pain nor of being as much fun as Richard Kiel’s toothy terror Jaws in “The Spy Who Loved Me,” produces a little havoc as we await the big showdown with Lisbeth. But that fizzles out just when it’s getting started.

A would-be climactic trial all but ignores the question of whether Salander tried to kill her evil dad as she vamps around in a mohawk and sets about proving that her court-ordered shrink is yet another sweaty perv. (He’s essentially the same dirty old man as her dad and the legal guardian in the first movie — is any middle-aged dude in Sweden not into child abuse?) Moments of heated drama are marked by dialogue like, “He’s going to pay for this!” and “We’ve got to stick together, now more than ever.”

Since it’s obvious from the creepy camera angles that the shrink is a monster and we already know the truth about Lisbeth’s epic history with filthy old lechers, there’s no suspense in the court scenes. As for the once-flaming-hot love affair between her and Blomkvist, which is more or less completely forgotten (the two share almost no screen time in either of the final two films), it wraps up with these lines: “Thank you. See you around.”

Bland Blomkvist is even less interesting than the stock character of Lisbeth, who is merely a punked-up take on the feisty abuse survivor of a hundred Ashley Judd and Jennifer Lopez movies. He spends the movie slogging through a series of boring meetings while inept bad guys try to ruin his reputation by planting $120,000 and some cocaine in his house. I call that a party, not a frame-up. And how would the facts he discovers about Lisbeth be invalidated by his private indiscretions, anyway?

If Swedish villains are this dumb, put me on the next plane to Stockholm. Just don’t make me watch these idiotic movies on the flight.