THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST / LUFTSLOTTET SOM SPRENGTES - workmanlike and unwatchable

THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST is based on the final installment of Swedish investigative journalist Stieg Larsson's wildly popular Millenium Trilogy. The novel picks up from the previous installment. The anti-heroine Lisbeth Salander - genius hacker, emotional anorexic, victim of sexual abuse - spends half of the film in hospital recovering from an attempted murder at the hands of her father and brother - and the other half in court, defending herself for the attempted murder of her father. In both cases she is isolated, communicating with the outside world through an internet connection to her hacker friends, or by means of an autobiography she is writing. Many people risk everything to help expose her enemies and bring her justice - but she is so introverted she can barely register thanks. The first is kindly doctor Anders Jonasson who keeps the rozzers at bay; the second is Mikke Blomkvist, crusading journalist, who plans to expose all in his magazine, with the help of the entire Millenium staff.

The book is compelling for two reasons. First, as we see the conspiracy against Lisbeth exposed, we realise just how high up it goes - to the office of the Swedish Prime Minister, no less. The stakes are high, and as the court case proceeds, the tension mounts. In short, the book is a thriller that is genuinely thrilling. But more importantly, the book works because we've come to care about the characters. Lisbeth and Mikke may not be in the same room together but we feel there connection. And in the novel, Mikke's long-time colleague and sometime lover Erika Berger takes front-stage, when she leaves Millenium for the Swedish Morning Post and starts being bullied with explicit emails and texts. I thought the portrait of a successful career woman trying to balance her job with her emotions was particularly authentic.

Sadly, but not surprisingly, this Swedish adaptation, originally intended for the small screen, fails to do justice to the novel. The direction is visually uninspired, workmanlike and plodding, sapping all pace and tension from the narrative. The character of Erika Berger suffers most in the editing down of the novel to a still unwieldy two and a half hour run-time. The acting is just fine, but the actors have little to do but work through the text. Of the new characters, Aksel Morisse is sympathetic as the doctor Anders Jonasson but the rest are pretty unforgettable. The result was that I was so bored I almost walked out several times, preferring to remember the denouement as I had read it rather than in this insipid, tedious adaptation.

THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST / LUFTSLOTTET SOM SPRENDGTES opened in Denmark, Norway and Sweden in 2009 and in Finland, Iceland, Spain, The Netherlands, Greece, Estonia, Canada, Germany, the USA, Switzerland, Austria, Singapore, France and Japan earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in Indonesia in January 2011.

THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE - heart-stripped

Lisbeth Salander, a young, rebellious, autistic computer hacker, returns to Stockholm to enforce her revenge on her sexually abusive state-appointed guardian, Nils Bjurman. But, soon after, Bjurman is murdered, along with two young investigators who were about to expose a sex-trafficking scandal, in which he was implicated. The police think Lisbeth is the murderer and she goes on the run. Only her old lover and friend, Mikke Blomkvist; her current lover Miriam; her old boxing buddy (real-life star) Paolo Roberto, and her kindly first guardian, Holger Palmgren, believe she innocent. But they can't track her down to help her. As it so happens, it was Blomkvist's magazine that was going to be publishing the sex-trafficking expose, and as he picks up the trail of the gangster Zala, he is led back to Lisbeth, who also believes that Zala was involved in her scandalous abuse as a child. So unfolds the true story of Lisbeth's god-awful childhood, and the reality of the complicity of the Swedish state in her abuse.

I loved Daniel Alfredson's faithful adaptation of Swedish thriller, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO. It was a well-acted, competently-made crime drama with a convincing relationship at its heart - that between campaigning journalist, Mikke Blomkvist; and his sometime researcher and lover, Lisbeth Salander. Salander's character - emotionally avoidant, scrupulously fair, kick-ass - is the most sale-able thing about these books. But it also makes them hard to access at an emotional level, without the reader being able to experience her through the softer focus of her friendship with Mikke, her loyalty to her lover Miriam, and her respect for her old guardian, Holger Palmgren. The problem with the sequel, THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, is that we don't get enough of the relationships - we simply don't see Lisbeth on screen together with Mikke, or Holger or Miriam, long enough to engage emotionally. And without that, the movie just becomes a crime procedural. Worst of all, because most people who watch this film will be fans of the book, a crime procedural to which we already know the answer. To be fair, partly this is unavoidable. The film-makers have to stick to the broad outline of the book, and to that end, they have no choice but to keep Mikke and Lisbeth apart. But, Stieg Larson gave us compensation in the novel. He gave us the reunion of Lisbeth and Palmgren, something which is skated over very quickly in the film - and most importantly, he gave us the intriguing character of the cop, Jan Bublanski - charged with tracking "murderer" Lisbeth down, but a man who instinctively knows something far more murky has been going down. With only a small role for Jan, and a resultingly small role for the police in the investigation, the movie seemed to have no centre, no momentum, and no interest for me. I was actually bored by it, and was really very disappointed indeed.

THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE was released in the Nordics, Italy and Spain last year, and was released earlier this year in Greece, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Estonia, Portugal, France, the US and Argentina. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in September in Japan and Singapore.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO - a faithful adaptation of a great thriller

Niels Arden Oplev's screen adaptation of the wildly successful Stieg Larsson thriller, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, is a sure crowd-pleaser. Though still coming in at two and a half hours, it is an admirably condensed and faithful adaptation of a complicated thriller. As fans will be well aware - and I'm assuming most people who see the film will have already read all three books - the movie is about two people who form an unlikely bond in order to investigate an old crime in one of Sweden's most prominent families. Years ago, a young girl disappeared from the wealthy island inhabited largely by her family - the Vangers. In old age, her grand-uncle hires disgraced investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist to re-examine the case and the rogue's gallery of former Nazis and selfish old bastards that make up the Vanger family. Blomkvist is a like-able decent guy - and in his relationship with his long time mistress and best friend Erika, as well as with his new found aide, Lisbeth Salander, he proves that he is a "man who loves women". He enjoys their company, enjoys making love to them, treats them as equals and with respect. But Lisbeth Salander - the true star of the books and this film - is a prickly character - highly intelligent, gifted with computers, a victim of extreme abuse, and as uncomfortable in her skin as Blomkvist is at peace.

I found the direction to be workmanlike in all but the elegant way in which the IT hacking was depicted. What set the movie apart was, source material notwithstanding, the genuine sympathy between, and charisma of, the two lead characters. Michael Nyqvist is superb as the laconic Blomkvist, and Noomi Rapace commits physically and psychologically so fully to being Lisbeth Salander that you can feel the ferocity. And this is important, because inevitably, in order to compress the film, the side relationships - and the smaller characters at Millenium and Milton Security - have been stripped away. As a result, the film lives and dies by whether you are emotionally affected by an abused woman opening a small sliver of her life to Blomkvist. This is much more pivotal than solving the "whodunnit". After all, if there's any real message to Larson's novel, it's that the establishment in its entirety did it.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO was released in 2009 in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Hungary, Finland, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, Italy, Spain, Iceland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Germany, Greece, Austria, Poland and New Zealand. It opened earlier this year in Japan and Estonia. It is currently on release in the US and UK and opens next weekend in Australia. It opens on April 23rd in Brazil.

Additional tags: Jacob Groth, Jens Fischer, Eric Kress, Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Lena Endre, Peter Haber, Sven-Bertil Taube, Peter Andersson, Ingvar Hirdwall, Marika Lagercrantz, Ewa Froling, Tomas Kohler, Gosta Bredefeldt, Niels Arden Oplev.