It opens minutes after the second film closes (well, really the whole film is a 150-minute epilogue to the second film) with Lisbeth being medivac'd to a hospital where she has to recover from injuries sustained after trying to kill her father and half-brother (who she hates). She goes to the hospital and then is arrested for attempting to murder her father. She then contacts Mikael Blomkvist (of course) and give him her whole life story (which I feel like we've heard a few times before).
Blomkvist gets his sister, a public defender of some sort, to defend Lisbeth. The main witness for the prosecution is Dr. Teleborian, the psychiatrist who ran the orphanage she was sent to at age 12, and also the man who raped her and organized mental evaluations saying she was unfit to live without monitoring. Then there's some very boring stuff about him saying she's still schizophrenic and making up all this rape stuff and her maintaining her innocence.
Basically this is a very, very long and boring courtroom drama - but where the evidence is so strongly based on one side and the other side is clearly held together with spit and duct tape. There is no conceivable way that Lisbeth could be found guilty (even considering how much she's suffered at the hands of the 'system'). We know well that what she's saying is true and that the prosecution has no evidence aside from Teleborian's dodgy testimony.
There is a ridiculous segment for about 15 minutes where the doctor is saying that her assertions that she was raped by her guardian (which we saw in the first film and saw at least one other time in the second film on video) are entirely made up and not true. All her lawyer needs to do is show the video of her being raped and then the whole case for the prosecution would fall apart. Somehow the Swedish trial system is different from most western courts and there is no discovery or anything, so when the lawyer finally plays the video, everyone is totally shocked by its contents and realizes she's telling the truth. It's really not very good drama.
On top of this, there is almost no action to speak of in this film. What was fun in the first movie, and sorta fun in the second movie, were the chase scenes (hey - it's an action movie, right?). Here there are basically no chase scenes and they're replaced by very dialogue-heavy scenes of people talking about stuff we already know well.
It is clear, after seeing the trilogy, that the first movie stands on its own and is a fun action movie. The second and third movies are really two parts of what is effectively a secondary story (well, they also deal with Lisbeth, but they're mostly unrelated). In the end, the first one is the only film really worth seeing; the second and third films are not really worth seeing. If anything, see the second and not the third. She goes free at then end. Boring.
Stars: 1 of 4
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