The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest Reviews
Top CriticA more apt title would be 'The Girl Who Sat Quietly in a Dimly Lit Room'.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
It's only our investment in these fascinating characters and in wholly unraveling the mystery of Lisbeth Salander's awful past that keep it compelling.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is too akin to the tidying up of a television-series finale - albeit a very classy franchise with fine characters and able performances.
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| Original Score: 3/4
If you haven't seen the first two films, do so and then see this one. If you have seen them, chances are you're already in the ticket line. Hornet's Nest has such a sweet sting.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
Much of the problem can be traced to the villains of the piece: The snakes in the establishment are a bunch of really old white guys. Now this may be true to life, but it's hell on drama.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
One of the knottiest, talkiest tangles of celluloid to roll into theaters this year.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Feels like the concluding chapter it is, with neatly tied loose ends and closing remarks, though it unfolds as something of a secular passion play.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
An overgenerous helping of recapitulation, a long procedural that's more about Lisbeth's persecutors and protectors than about her.
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
The final, deeply satisfying conclusion to the trilogy of Swedish thrillers based on Stieg Larsson's bestselling novels.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
An extremely satisfying ending to the story of Lisbeth Salander, the tough Swedish cyber punk that actress Noomi Rapace has turned into an iconic New Age heroine.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
It always is a challenge to convert a dense novel to the screen, but Hornet's Nest starts so slowly that it has a lot to overcome when it finally reveals some surprises in the last third of the film.
More than the other two, this is Rapace's movie; Michael Nyqvist's ever-rumpled Blomkvist has less to do, and their main scene together is just a tantalizing glimpse at the end; a brief, poignant reminder that we've come to the end of the road...
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Hornet's Nest is talky but indisputably terrific, and it ends in a dazzling display of courtroom fireworks. Rapace is hot stuff in any language. Oscar, take heed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The film huffs and wheezes under the strain of its narrative baggage.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Anyone who has read Larsson's novels will be sympathetic to filmmakers trying to pare down and distill these books.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
A rousing, grueling, almost operatically scaled finale to the series.
As superb as the Swedish actress Noomi Rapace has been up to this point, there's nothing she can do to bring craft or excitement to the act of texting.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest comes close to self-parody at times ... [but] the final chapter has its satisfying turns.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Since the heroine spends half her screen time recovering from brain surgery, Rapace has less to do than in the first two movies, but she's striking in full punk regalia during a tense courtroom sequence.
Unlike The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which can stand on its own, the other two films need to be seen as a set. Neither is complete without the other.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It's a rather wobbly blend of courtroom drama and loose ends tied, albeit rather leisurely.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
So what has happened is that this uptight, ferocious, little gamine Lisbeth has won our hearts, and we care about these stories and think there had better be more.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is mostly an epic rehash of the tale Larsson has already told, and that makes it, at two hours and 28 minutes, the first movie in the series that never catches fire.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
Lisbeth stuck in a confined space is like Superman trapped in a phone booth: It's a blueprint for a mighty boring superhero movie.
Nearly two and a half hours have been filled with the clickety-clack of laptops, extremely polite interrogations and the feverish researching of -- wait for it -- a multipage magazine article.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Like the first two Millennium movies, this final installment feels thoughtlessly put together, its script unpruned and rushed through, all to capitalize on the staggering worldwide popularity of its dead author.
Larsson is renowned for his attention to marginal details, which gives his prose a rambling, one-thing-after-another pace that many readers find soothing. Onscreen, the lack of acceleration makes for one of those long Scandinavian winter nights.
The movie features a great finish, where three movies' worth of subplots and characters dovetail into a breathtaking climax and final confrontation that is positively soul satisfying.
