The Next Bog Thing (But Does It Deserve It?)

Rating: 6/10 (30 March 2012)

Out with the old (Potter and those shiny vampires), in with the new! The Hunger Games is the next in line of young adult adaptations steamrolling their way into the theaters, to the extreme delight and disappointment of fans of the books.
The arguments are eternal: Did it really capture the tone of the book? Did they get all the details right? Did that character actually look like that?
On and on they go, but really, the only question that should be asked is, did they make a good movie? In order to get that answer, let's move right ahead into the review and see what made it onto the big screen.
The Hunger Games is a dystopian tale of twelve outlying districts that must sacrifice one young boy and one young girl up to their capital every year to participate in a televised battle to the death. Katniss Everdeen volunteers herself in place of her younger sister and we follow her into battle, not only over the other "tributes", but also over the deadly pitfalls in the arena and the bloodthirsty nature of a society that allows these games to continue.
First off, this movie clocked in at just under two and a half hours, which is incredibly long for a teen flick. Even Harry Potter didn't dare create such a marathon until well into the franchise where they knew fans would eat up every minute of it. Also highlighting the length was the incredibly slow pacing. The experience was oddly reminiscent of seeing The Da Vinci Code, where the original book was an eye-popping page turner, but the on-screen rendition seemed to suck all the life out of it. The Hunger Games didn't quite starve itself into a cinematic coma, but there certainly was a momentum and energy missing in the translation.
As for the actors, Jennifer Lawrence was the prodigal choice and really brought much of that angst, conflict and fire-in-the-belly attitude Katniss needed to have. Josh Hutcherson also displayed a great deal of the heartfelt charm and inner strength that made Peeta such an easy character to root for in the books. Wes Bentley also gets a special mention for pulling off the expertly choreographed beard, but I missed a touch of the creepiness I expected from the Head Gamekeeper. Beyond that, everyone I felt did what they needed to do, but there weren't any stand out performances.
The story was there, the pages played out on-screen almost right off the page, but it felt like they tried too hard to capture everything from the book, making it overly long, yet dropped particular sections that would have better served the overall experience. In that regard, without going into too much detail, I'll point to the mutts and how disappointing that entire sequence was. The whole point of who and what they were was lost, making them nothing more than aggressive bulldogs.
Now there have been reviews buzzing around all weekend about this movie, so this will likely get swept away in the digital wind of the internet, but I must say this in closing. To those people who were upset because Rue and Thresh were cast as African-Americans, while Suzanne Collins didn't feel the need to spend a whole lot of time and energy repeatedly describing the races of her characters, those two were in fact written as "dark skinned", so the casting was not "politically correct", just correct. Secondly, to those people who went the step further to say that you felt less when they died because of that casting, yep, you guessed it, you're racist.