What Happened To Monday (2017)

In an overpopulated world of food shortages and unrest, a one-child policy is strictly enforced meaning illegal septuplets, all played The Klumps-style by Noomi Rapace, grow up confined to an apartment with each able to venture outside only on their one allocated day per week and only provided they all pretend to be the same person, which is the starting point of this patently absurd scifi action that sees the septuplets' lives (blessed lives free from health emergencies, apartment fires, unwanted visitors and noise complaints from neighbours) suddenly thrown into disarray when "Monday" goes missing and the remaining six, despite their cloistered upbringings, find themselves suddenly able to take on evil agents repeatedly breaking down their apartment door.

★★☆☆☆

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The Girl Who Played With Fire (Flickan som lekte med elden) (2009)

Released in the same year, 2009, as Dragon Tattoo, this sequel in fact takes up the story one full year later, so was released in shorter time than the story - but that is still so short a time, Played With Fire feels like just the second half of one looong movie - with this part filling in some of the details surrounding Salander's, er, particular way of being (ruthless, traumatised goth fighting machine) while she computer-hacks and investigates and becomes the prime suspect in another mystery, this time involving sex trafficking, which she investigates in unison with - but again physically distanced from - her journalist friend (Michael Nyqvist as Blomkvist) and it ends up being more "James Bond" than the first movie's Agatha Christie-style 40-year-old murder-mystery-in-a-mansion - there's even a hulking Jaws character impervious to pain!

★★★☆☆

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The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor) (2009)

I came very late to these adaptations of the Stieg Larsson books - was I on another planet? - but have, in 2021,  finally watched the Swedish movie series and can say they are gripping, often brutal action mysteries, this first one introducing Noomi Rapace as the kickass title heroine who investigates a 40-year-old murder mystery, one of those plots that require a fair suspension of your disbelief as details from all those decades ago present themselves to the hacker-slash-investigator impossibly conveniently, untouched and intact in the modern day.

★★★★☆

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Dead Man Down (2013)

Intriguing enough given its roundabout way of revealing its fairly basic plot, this revenge flick about a man double-crossing a gang lord wants to be an Infernal Affairs/The Departed action thriller with the epic-ness of Heat but the writing, which tries to squeeze romance out of a situation between a blackmailer and the man she wants to coerce into committing murder for her - writing which also has Noomi Rapace's character driven to murder because three red lines on her forehead destroyed her career as a beautician - is just too dopey too often for the action to be able to soar to Infernal Affairs/Heat heights.

★★☆☆☆

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Passion (2012)

The original Love Crime was a peculiar slip of a corporate thriller seemingly made up of lethargic first takes and about as remarkable as an episode of Models Inc but it still managed to intrigue, which cannot be said of Brian de Palma's remake which tries to dress things up with some de Palma thriller clichés - sex and a spiral stair and masks and twins - but they add nothing, really, and the new revamped ending is meaningless.

★★☆☆☆

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The Monitor (Babycall) (2011)

It disappoints ultimately in the way mystery thrillers with a delusional main character always do - your questions can't be answered because no information can be relied upon, and just how is she experiencing the cold and wet of a non-existent lake? - but this is suspenseful most of the way with Noomi Rapace playing a traumatised mother living in fear with her son.

★★★☆☆

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Prometheus (2012)

This sci-fi horror on an epic scale has in its relatively short runtime way too many lofty themes and too many character story arcs - the one about Charlize Theron's family tree is the most clanging and underdeveloped - and so it all feels rushed, and in place of satisfying conclusions, there is an almost completely unnecessary - or, at least, unexplained - tie-in with Ridley Scott's Alien; nonetheless, this succeeds in being thought-provoking and entertaining.

★★★☆☆

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