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"The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest," the third and ostensibly final film with Noomi Rapace playing the part of Swedish hacker-punk-heroine Lisbeth Salander, opens Friday to the approval of Roger Ebert. He speculates that, even though writer Stieg Larsson only finished three "Girl" novels before he died, the Lisbeth character will somehow continue. He hopes so, anyway.
Lisbeth Salander makes a transfixing heroine precisely because she has nothing but scorn for such a role. Embodied here for the third time by Noomi Rapace, she's battered, angry and hostile, even toward those who would be her friends. Some of the suspense in the final courtroom showdown of "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" comes from the excellent question of whether she would rather be found guilty than provide anyone with the satisfaction of hearing her testify in her own defense.[skip]
That frees the director, Daniel Alfredson, to focus more time on Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), the investigative journalist who collaborated with her in the first film and has become her fierce defender — and perhaps more, a man who loves her. Their mutual affection was an intriguing subtext in the first film, but has been on hold ever since, while Mikael continues his relaxed intimacy with his editor, Erika Berger (Lena Endre). There are said to be two more Larsson novels in various stages of completion, but even if they're not publishable, Lisbeth Salander is too good a character to suspend after three films, and my guess is there must be sequels.....
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.
Maybe so, but Rapace was back in Hollywood this week and saying, once again, that she's done with the role. Meanwhile, Scott Timberg writes that Larsson's Millennium Trilogy "has become the publishing phenomenon of the young century...success [that] has few parallels in publishing...without a single bookstore signing, author appearance or Charlie Rose interview." Larsson died in 2004, before the books became a sensation.
Previously on LA Observed:
Noomi Rapace talks about moving on
Um, another Lisbeth post after all *