Game of Drones

Rating: 5/10 (18 August 2012)

Here we go again: Storytelling 101 - show your audience, don't TELL them.
The Hunger Games is a painful exercise in incessant exposition. For an action movie built upon the survival instincts of a young and humble warrior, the majority of the film is spent watching people explain things to the heroine and the audience, almost all of which is totally unnecessary. You don't really need to know about sponsors, apartments, blue hair or the repetitious "Rules of the Game" so to speak. It just ends up dragging what is essentially a 80- minute movie nearly an hour longer. Despite all the talk of myth that inspired the original novel, we've seen it all before in what is unambiguously adapted from the Most Dangerous Game. Once you get over the novelty of kids killing kids - which seems to be no novelty at all if you watch the news - there isn't much here to go on.
Jennifer Lawrence has an honest face which owns every scene, but unfortunately Gary Ross gets it all wrong. Ross cuts to so many arbitrary setups, he seems lost on how to lens and frame this story and by consequence, who to connect with. You end up not caring who lives or dies in what SHOULD be a story of life and death. On the dramatic side, we spend more time hearing people jabber on about nonsense than see them act upon anything. Characters in The Hunger Games seemingly talk AT Katniss, never TO her and it all funnels into unmemorable noise. The empty dialog is shuttled around by lots of unmotivated shaky cam and quick cutting nonsense that doesn't edit. The movie just doesn't flow well and in the scenes where it finally does - always in action - it is short lived. At the end of every scene, I was awaiting the commercials because it feels like a hastily produced FOX show for Friday night.
I really just wanted to see the young and talented Jennifer Lawrence out in the wild tracking down Arnold Schwarzenegger from the Running Man. But instead we are held hostage by Gary Ross's witless direction and a dry talky script. This is a movie with a character but no story, a setup but no payoff. Lots of hunger and very little game.
Don't tell me I should read the book, because I'll just tell you to watch a movie like Hanna, instead.