Review: The Hunger Games

Set in a future America where the country is divided into twelve regions and ruled by a decadent dictatorship that requires twelve boys and twelve girls from each district (aged 12-18) to participate in ‘The Hunger Games’, a “Turkey Shoot”-style gladiatorial contest, a fight to the death broadcast nationwide on TV. The contestants are selected by lottery draw, and at the end of the contest, there can be only one winner/survivor. Jennifer Lawrence plays 16 year-old Katniss Everdeen, whose younger sister Primrose is selected to compete, but Katniss throws her own hat in the ring instead to protect her sister. Josh Hutcherson plays the chosen male from Katniss’ district, Donald Sutherland plays the societal patriarch, a fantastically bearded Wes Bentley plays the chairman of the Hunger Games, and Stanley Tucci is a facile, blue-haired TV host who interviews the contestants like a campy Ryan Seacrest. Elizabeth Banks and Woody Harrelson play Effie Trinket (the gaudy-looking selector of the lottery) and Haymitch Abernathy (a sympathetic but mostly drunk mentor to the contestants, who survived the games himself). Liam Hemsworth plays a cutie from Katniss’ district, Toby Jones is Tucci’s offsider, and Lenny Kravitz plays a sympathetic fashionista in charge of dressing Katniss for the games. ‘Coz cold-blooded combat could always use a nice pant suit or some accessorising, apparently. Beware, because in the future UFC will be sponsored by Revlon and Prada!

 

Although my initial fears that this 2012 film would be a sanitised rip-off of “Battle Royale” proved unfounded (i.e. It also rips off the shitty Ozploitation film “Turkey Shoot” and every other “Most Dangerous Game” variant, so who cares?), this Gary Ross directed, big screen version of the first in the trilogy of young adult books by Suzanne Collins (whose claim of never watching “Battle Royale” is, however, clearly bullshit), is still a terrible, idiotic waste of time. How is it that Ross could make the wonderful “Pleasantville” and now this lame-brained junior “Turkey Shoot”?

 

In fact, this is only Ross’ third film, after the aforementioned and “Seabiscuit”. If he’s a picky director, I’m not sure how he landed on this hackneyed stuff, and sadly he proves completely incompetent. He is most certainly not aided by the normally excellent cinematographer Tom Stern (“The Exorcism of Emily Rose”, “Flags of Our Fathers”). Yes, the film is good-looking, but most of that is due to the scenery and use of colour. The actual camerawork is another matter entirely, as it kills whatever good work Stern does in choosing what to shoot. If ever a film needed to be shot in shaky, hand-held style...this isn’t it. And I’m talking about dialogue scenes as well. Handheld camerawork, when used necessarily and judiciously, can be effective. When used unnecessarily, it makes shot composition entirely irrelevant. It’s incompetently done. Shaking the camera does nothing terribly effective in reflecting the main character’s POV (which I’ve heard suggested), it only serves to alert you to the camera’s presence. Forget about the PG-13 rating in the US neutering the violent content (given the target audience, it’s a Catch-22 anyway), the awful camerawork fails to register much of the violence coherently anyway. It’s not neutered, it’s incompetent, uninteresting, and ineffectual.

 

The screenplay is by Ross, Billy Ray (“Shattered Glass”, “Breach”, “Flightplan”), and Collins herself, and their three supposed talents combined prove incapable of bringing life to what is essentially the same hoary old “Most Dangerous Game” scenario but with young people. Yeah, let’s do all the character-building stuff in flashbacks, mostly mute, and edited into smithereens. Yeah, that’s the ticket. And I don’t think that the novel’s first-person account is enough of an excuse. The set-up is terrible. It’s really bizarre and not even the title crawl is very helpful in getting us into the situation.

 

Also, the character names are all frankly a bit naff. I mean, Katniss Everdeen? Really? These are some of the worst character names since “To Kill a Mockingbird”, and I bet the book ain’t no classic on the level of Harper Lee’s masterwork. This is just poorly written, and even the action hasn’t been beefed up in absence of the character stuff. It’s just lots of time-wasting instead, with Ross having absolutely no sense of pacing whatsoever. For a film with a hackneyed plot, that’s disastrous (I’ve read that Ross’ decision to use shaky-cam was for a feeling of ‘urgency’. Um...then why not hurry the pacing then, you idiot?). The first hour of the film plays like the Mad Hatter’s tea party stretched out and crossed with a Nicki Minaj concert. And it conks out at this point because the killing still hasn’t even started yet, and there’s nothing else going on, either. Talk about glacial-pacing, and there’s gonna be two more of these things! Hopefully they get to the bloody point a whole lot quicker.

 

I said earlier that it’s a rather attractive film, but my God the costume design (including very “Turkey Shoot”-like garb for the henchmen) and makeup in this is atrocious and frankly just absurd. Let’s just say that the flaming chariots aren’t the only things here that are flaming, OK? (And I’m not just talking about the lame-arse CGI forest fire. Couldn’t they have just used a real fire? Like they used to in the movies?) It’s so off-putting and awful that it renders a lot of the cast completely helpless. This is especially true for Elizabeth Banks and the usually excellent Stanley Tucci. Tucci is saddled with a very silly role in an already very silly film, and has ridiculous blue hair. Elizabeth Banks looks and acts somewhere in between “Alice in Wonderland” and “101 Dalmatians”. Truly absurd, I almost felt sorry for her. Usually she’s very good, but here she’s really, really not. Anjelica Huston or Meryl Streep might’ve done something with the role, but not Banks. Wes Bentley, meanwhile, has fantastic facial hair and an intense stare, but he does not have a character worth a damn. That’s true of a lot of the cast here, though. For instance, although Liam Hemsworth appears on screen here, his character does not exist in this film. Yes, I know that’s impossible, but watch the film and tell me I’m wrong. Donald Sutherland’s character, although seemingly important, has less than one dimension. Sutherland is often a terrific actor, but even he can’t perform miracles (He did essentially play Jesus, though, in “Johnny Got His Gun”). Impish Toby Jones, meanwhile...gets to sit next to Stanley Tucci. I only worked that out after 90 or so minutes, though, that’s how much of an impression he makes.

 

Sadly, the two leads are even worse, the phenomenally overrated (and now Oscar-winning) Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson. I haven’t seen her Oscar-winning turn in “Silver Linings Playbook” as of yet, but based on her work in “X Men: First Class” and now this, I have to say that I find Jennifer Lawrence boring as hell. She’s one-note, has one facial expression throughout the entire film (boredom, by the looks of it), and based on what I’ve seen of her thus far she has zero charisma or presence. I don’t know why, but I also find her extremely uncomfortable to watch on screen, despite seemingly like a lovely girl in real-life. Maybe it’s the inflated lips, tiny eyes and general young Renee Zellweger visage she has going on. Or perhaps she’s just really, really bad here. She certainly isn’t an interesting enough actress for her to have so many long stretches of silence. We get it, she’s “The Last of the Mohicans”. Enough with the bow and arrow crap already. So she joins Scarlett Johansson, Jessica Chastain, and Kristen Stewart in the category of actresses I just don’t ‘get’.

 

As for Josh Hutcherson, well, he’s even less interesting and charismatic than Lawrence, and given these are the two actors afforded the most character depth, you can understand why the killing scenes have absolutely no impact whatsoever. We only get to know two of the damn participants, to the point where I didn’t realise until the film was over that one of the other kids was played by the creepy girl from “Orphan” (Isabelle Fuhrman). On reflection, I know who she played, but given how short shrift the character is given, she made no impact on me during the film. With “Battle Royale”, the film was violent and disturbing enough that it didn’t much matter that the characters tended to blend together (and it kinda fit the uniformity and rigidity of the culture anyway), but by going the PG-13 route here (unavoidable or not), the violence is rendered ineffectual. But this film didn’t need the violence, so long as it was an otherwise good movie. It’s not.

 

By far the best and only genuinely good performances come from Lenny Kravitz (in a brief turn), and especially Woody Harrelson. Kravitz proves yet again to be a decent actor, while Harrelson’s the only one here having any fun at all. He’s good fun, the film isn’t.

 

Anyone who likes this film is either a Kool-Aid drinker fan geek, or has seen two or three movies in their lifetime and read two or three books. That said, it’s not as bad as “Turkey Shoot”, so that’s...something I guess. If this, the “Twilight” series, and “Tomorrow, When the Red Dawn Rip Off Began” are indicative of the quality of young adult fiction, then young adult fiction clearly sucks balls.

 

I’d suggest that this awful film flops around and dies for two hours, but that would suggest a level of energy that this film does not possess. And where were Locke and Charlie? Did they find Claire’s baby? And when do we find out the secrets of the island?

 

Rating: D