Review #906: 'The Hunger Games: Catching Fire' (2013)

While 2012's The Hunger Games, based on the opener of Suzanne Collins' trilogy, was very much a collection of familiar genre tropes and felt like Battle Royale (2000) for the Harry Potter generation, its themes of class suppression by a ruling elite and the grumblings of a working-class revolution felt refreshing for a story primarily aimed at a younger audience, and also extremely relevant to our times when wealth is seemingly celebrated above all else. Following the first instalment is the awkward middle entry, always struggling to bridge the gap between a fresh new world and its inevitable final showdown. Catching Fire struggles where most other middle sections fail - it's essentially a re-hash of the first film, and fails to progress the story enough to warrant its 2 hour 20 minute running time.

The movie makes a few key mistakes. Above all, it makes the terrible assumption that you've already read the book, failing to explain various aspects of the story which, although it doesn't confuse the rather straightforward plot, it left certain questions niggling in my brain. If the ultimate goal is to kill everybody you're lumped with and be the lone survivor, then why are teams of 'allies' forged by the game maker? What's really going on in the slums that we only glimpse in scenes of dusty faced onlookers? And are The Hunger Games, an event in which young members of the poor are plucked at random to inevitably die, really the best way to control an increasingly disgruntled majority? These questions aside, Catching Fire is also plain boring.

Picking up shortly after the climax of the first film, where the bow-and-arrow-wielding Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) won the Hunger Games with her close friend Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) after choosing to die together rather than one surviving, the two champions are left pondering the aftermath. Finding herself a hero to the enslaved working class, President Snow (Donald Sutherland) insists that she play her role and help maintain social order. Following a few incidents of rebellion, Snow decides that Katniss is a threat and turns to new Gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman) for council. His idea is to throw all the past victors of the Hunger Games into the event together, bending the rules in his favour by introducing a natural disaster or event every hour, including poisonous mist and killer mandrills.

Despite Jennifer Lawrence's obvious star quality, Katniss comes across as one-dimensional and charisma-free, failing to justify her 'chosen one' status. Her budding romance with gruff district worker Gale (Liam Hemsworth), to whom she explains that her kiss with Peeta was merely a way to manipulate the audience into aiding her survival (although her feelings may be becoming real), feels like a discarded draft of Twilight. The characters are so robotic that I simply didn't care who lived and who died. Catching Fire ultimately feels like a way of stretching out a story that could have been told in two instalments, where, by the end, I felt like we were no further along than where we were at the start. The ending comes so abruptly that it's obvious the filmmakers are under the illusion that they're leaving us thirsty for more, but while that may be the case for its huge fanbase, it left me staring at the screen waiting for any kind of satisfaction that I knew would never come.


Directed by: Francis Lawrence
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland, Elizabeth Banks, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Lenny Kravitz
Country: USA

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie