Could have been so much better...

Rating: 3/10 (28 March 2012)

I have a lot of problems with this movie. First off, I never read the books and didn't really know anything about this movie going in. I had heard the basic premise that kids were going to be fighting to the death in some game controlled by a fascist, totalitarian state and it intrigued me. This sounded like a smart, sci-fi that should reveal something about how we glorify violence or give our government too much power or something. I expected to be enlightened, at least to some degree. Let's start with the good. Jennifer Lawrence is fantastic as Katniss, our reluctant heroine. Her performance was one of the few things that kept me from walking out of the theater. The plot's kind of interesting, I guess. It kept me awake. Now on to the bad. The movie has no idea what it's trying to be. It tries to show us how horrible the government is, but I never really seemed to notice anything that made them look bad aside from the games. It tries to be an action flick, but no action occurs until the last hour or so when the games start. And even then, the camera is so jerky and the director cuts so often it's hard to tell exactly what is happening. I couldn't tell whether the screenplay was awful or the production because I found it very hard to care for anyone in this story. We're supposed to feel bad for Katniss and her sister, but we never really see anything that shows how horrible her life is. There are a couple of moments later where we get a glimpse into her terrible past, but I couldn't find any time to care because they jumped quickly past this and and went right back to the slaughtering of children. Oh yeah, speaking of slaughtering children, why was this movie PG-13? This is a very R-rated story, but I guess they wanted to market it to the teenage audience or something. The lack of an R-rating really bogs down the film through poor action sequences and unbelievable dialogue. I guess the filmmakers just wanted to make money instead of making art. This really did feel as juvenile as Twilight and that really hurt the movie.
OK, this is all well and good, but I really didn't start to hate this movie until the end. I know this is supposed to be the next Harry Potter franchise or whatever, but the main difference between this and Harry Potter is that every Harry Potter movie can stand on it's own (excluding the last two). Each movie had a plot line that, while adding to the over-arching plot of the series, was independent and could stand alone as one story. The Hunger Games does not do this. In the end, I felt cheated. Nobody won. Katniss has to go back to her life of hunting and caring for her family and, as far as I can tell, nothing is changed. The government is still in power and the riot is quelled and broken up like its a high school party being busted by the cops.
Overall, I felt the good acting couldn't overcome the poorly written script and shoddy directing. The filmmakers didn't want to make art, they just wanted teenage girls to give them a lot of money. And they succeeded in that. My theater was filled with girls gasping and cheering as these children on-screen killed each other. Good thing I saw it during matinée, because paying full price for this is unthinkable.