The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest (2009)

Author Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy grinds to a close in two and a half hours of TV-movie dullness.

After the excellent The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, you knew the trilogy had gone off the rails when disturbed Goth heroine Lisbeth Salander’s father was revealed as a Soviet KGB defector. It took The Girl Who Played with Fire out of edgy serial-killer thriller territory into seen-it-before conspiracy non-thriller, with a disfigured dodgy Russian and a blonde East German side kick the size of the Berlin Wall and no sense of pain.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest is less of the same, spread over a longer running time but with added espionage and a ludicrous court-room drama thrown in.

The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009)

The Millenium Trilogy slams into the ‘awkward middle episode’ as a jumble of TV detective fiction with some sex, violence and post-Cold War espionage thrown in to liven things up.

After the excellent, if un-cinematic, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it looked like the adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s Millenium novels would be the next hot film franchise. Made swiftly to capitalise on the International success of the first instalment, The Girl Who Played With Fire has all the elements but not quite the, well, fire…

Disjointed and with a disappointingly loopy plot, Noomi Rapace gets credit for saving this also-ran Sunday evening TV mystery.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2010)

Remaining largely faithful to the late Steig Larsson’s source novel, this long and TV-styled thriller brings punk hacker Lisbeth Salander to the screen. Michael Nyqvist’s rather dull journalist Blomkvist is shunted aside by Noomi Rapace’s mesmeric performance as the titular heroine.

This is a movie that divides opinion: smart thriller featuring a feminist action-heroine, or an exploitation flick that savours violence against women?

Campaigning journalist Blomkvist loses a libel case against a wealthy businessman, and is offered a working exile by an equally wealthy industrialist. Determined to solve the forty year old disappearance of his niece, Vanger suspects his bickering family of her murder. Salander cannot resist breaking cover to help in the investigation…