If you read the book, it's pretty much more of the same in this adaptation

Rating: 7/10 (18 May 2012)

While Suzzane Collins' remarkably addictive, intense and (mildly) controversial "Hunger Games" seems like something that would work well on the larger-than-life big screen, the new film adaptation suffers the same flaws of pretty much every Hollywood adaptation of a massively popular literary series: it's engaging enough but never really has a life of it's own. If it was allowed to truly break free on screen, without the demands of many eager fans and blockbuster-hungry studio executives demanding faithfulness to it's source, it could've been something much darker and crazier than the rather cautious film we end up getting in. How exactly are you convinicly going to show a bunch of kids ruthlessly hunting down and killing each other with a PG-13 rating?
While Gary Ross is an able filmmaker who has shown bursts of creativity in previous works, is clearly playing by the book here. He stays very faithful to the narrative flow of the novel, with little of the major plot points out of place and only the occasional slight deviation of certain passages for the occasional dramatic effect. It ends up feeling frigid, never quite gaining momentum as it uses the plot outline of the novel more like a crutch rather than a jumping-off point. While it's certainly accessible enough for Newcomers and satisfying enough for (most) fans, it won't quite wow those who have read the book religiously or those who have no connection to it's literary source and are expecting a special cinematic experience of the film instead.
Perhaps since the screen adaptation automatically puts it's heroine, Katniss, in the third person, rather than as a narrator, the story loses a bit of it's immediacy and the character loses a bit of the emotional weight when we're just watching her story instead of living it. It's no fault of the actress embodying her, as Jennifer Lawrence brings that well-rounded steeliness that made her so captivating in her breakthrough role in Winter's Bone, a character that feels perhaps just a bit too similar to the one she's playing now. While Lawrence sounded great on paper, she seems just a bit too mature as an actress to really liven up a role that needed perhaps someone a little more unknown, younger and, pardon my diction, hungrier to feel honest. Her performance is certainly deft but rarely surprising, and she feels more like a surrogate for the audience rather than a distinct personality on her own right.
Although Katniss's character is slightly less compelling here than on book, that wouldn't matter if the actual Hunger Games we're as visceral and provocative as they would seem to be when projected on a much larger canvass, given a sense of right-in-front-of-your eyes shock that Collins' words could never quite convey. That, however, is where the superficiality of the film becomes most apparent. Gary Ross proves to be a decent storyteller but a rather hackeyned action director, mostly constantly swooshing the camera around when the shot is wide and using endless quick-cuts during the close-ups, inspiring a sense of mild vertigo rather than genuinely felt adrenaline. Both the predictable nature of the action sequences tied with the faithfulness of the script to it's source makes the whole Hunger Games feels rather predictable and illussionary as it would be on liveTV, not quite devolping the kind of eerie mood and ominous atmosphere that would've made the desperate, creul and just plain evil nature of the whole thing seem all that more horrifying.
Really, though, was it reasonable to expect that? Hollywood taking on an untested literary sleeper and trying to turn it into an even more lucrative, blockbuster is never a sign that there are major artistic risks to be made. So you pretty much get what you expect with The Hunger Games. And by all accounts it's a fairly engaging, easy-to-swallow piece of entertainment, if too slowly-paced and long for it's own good. However, it should've been more invigorating and just plain crazier, both physically and emotionally, than this rather tame and self-conscious book reading we get instead. In order for these films to work, the filmmakers have to get out of their comfort zones and let the more dangerous aspects of Collins' novel (there a few) really take center stage. It would be nice if these films we're meomorable on their own right, not just as a companion piece to it's literary source.