Left me a little hungry

Rating: 5/10 (6 April 2012)

Suzanne Collins' bestselling young-adult novel is given a competent yet disappointing film adaptation, but that hardly matters; the film is a conversation piece to put alongside the book, and as such it serves its purpose. What has happened here is that the director and the scenarists have approached the book so literally--in the fear that stylishness or imagination might repel teenage fans--that the result has the reverential tone of the first two Chris Columbus-directed Harry Potter movies. This also means that the book's main flaw is duplicated in the movie; namely, that the intriguing setup is more compelling than the games themselves.
The first, briefly sketched scenes are good and tense and build up a suitable sense of dread; the reaping scene, with families lining up silently in an open field as if they were attending Shirley Jackson's lottery (in a sense, they are); the sudden arrival of manic Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks), who looks like an airport gift-shop doll painted by someone on LSD; the initial scenes in the Capitol with its prancing, primping residents who could be extras from "Alice in Wonderland" wandering through the "Logan's Run" sets. Jennifer Lawrence grounds these sequences; her sculpted face, which can turn steely or vulnerable at will, seems to have everything extra burned out of it except the sheer will to survive. Once the games begin, though, the blood drains out (in more ways than one.) The shaky-cam is a disastrous choice; we're all used to it by now, and it's all too transparent as a way to camouflage the underage violence. If the first shot of the tributes leaving their posts were shot smoothly at some distance, the contrast between the pastoral setting and the animalistic battles would be truly terrifying. As it is, the filmmakers have shown so little interest in the other tributes that we barely react when the camera drifts over the bodies of those lost in that first deadly rush. Are Ross and company afraid that if they gave the other players "too much" personality we'd stop sympathizing with Katniss when she fights them? They needn't have bothered, because the author has let her heroine out of any truly challenging moral decisions. She only kills in self-defense, or when someone is attacking a "good" character. When she teams up with spritely little Rue (Amanda Stenberg), we're meant to feel torn, but then Rue is murdered by another tribute, whom Katniss then shoots dead. The scene is affecting (without pushing it) but we can't help noticing that now Katniss won't have to face the question of when (or whether) to kill Rue. What would have happened if Rue, Katniss, and Peeta had ended up in the final three? Structurally, the movie is thuddingly obvious; we know damned well Peeta and Katniss will survive to the end (so there can be a big "conflicted" last scene). And we periodically waste time with scenes of President Snow (Donald Sutherland) loitering lovingly over his perfect rose garden as he drops bits of totalitarian wisdom to a reluctant subordinate (Wes Bentley); these serve no purpose except to be "sinister", and Sutherland has reached the point where he can't be anything else. (The film stops just short of giving him a white cat to stroke.) There is one genuine accomplishment, however--Jennifer Lawrence spends nearly the whole movie running through the forest from her would-be killers--and she never once trips and falls full-length. As far as I know, that's a movie first.