When last we left our diminutive — but formidable — heroine, at the end of The Girl Who Played with Fire, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) had proven herself remarkably hard to kill. She’d been shot three times — including once in the head — and been buried alive, but managed to summon enough strength to claw her way out and deliver an axe blow to the head of the man who had put her in the ground to begin with: her no-good dad, Zalachenko.

This whole family is made up of die-hard characters. Lisbeth’s half-brother is a medical anomaly who is incapable of feeling pain and both Lisbeth and her father survive their head trauma — in the opening minutes of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, doctors in a Stockholm hospital patch them up, and the film establishes that the focus of this installment of the story will be Salandar’s legal defense: she stands charged of the attempted murder of her father, who claims to be innocent in all this. Blame for the attempted murder of Lisbeth has fallen to big brother, who’s now on the run.

Of the many things lacking in the second installment in this series, focus was at the top of the list. This is a far better effort than that one, though it still falls significantly short of the mark made by the first film, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Hornet’s Nest at least rectifies the lack of focus of part two, with its eyes always on that eventual courtroom showdown — which, when it comes, is some of the best, most tense material to be found here.