It's a reasonable film, but it's let down by its slow pacing and numerous scripting issues

Rating: 5/10 (23 November 2013)

The Hunger Games is basically a live televised battle which takes place every year. There are 12 districts and 2 people (1 male and 1 female aged between 12 and 18) from each district are chosen at random to compete in 'The Hunger Games'. Competing in the Hunger Games is mandatory as the 12 districts are governed under a Totalitarian regime. The Hunger Games is no ordinary battle and the contestants have to all battle against each other until the death until only one person remains. To make matters worse, not only do our unlucky gamers have to battle it out against each other, but they also have to contend with 'Career Gamers' - these are specially trained people who are experts in this field. When Katniss Everdeen's (Jennifer Lawrence) sister Primrose (Willow Shields) is chosen to take part in the Hunger Games, Katniss volunteers to take her place as she fears that her little sister will not survive the Hunger Games. Her male counterpart is Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson). All 24 gamers are put into battle together with only 1 person able to win;
One of the main problems with the Hunger Games was the pacing. I felt that it took far too long to get to the 'meat' of the plot. The first 2/3 of the film were excruciatingly slow and I was starting to lose interest. Thankfully, it did pick up and the final third (where the Games takes place) was fairly tense. The next big problem were some issues relating to the script;
**********************SPOILERS FOLLOW***************************
There is a scene towards the end of the film where Katniss is fighting one of the 'Career Gamers' and she fires 2 arrows into the Career Gamer's chest, but this has no effect on her opponent. After this scene I was scratching my head as I couldn't understand why arrows to the chest would have no effect on a person. Fortunately, I watched the film with someone who had read the book and they confirmed that it was because the Career Gamers wore body armour - great!!. It would have been nice if this had been explained at some point in the film. This one major flaw shows that this is not a particularly good adaptation from the book.
There is also a scene where Katniss drops a large wasp's nest onto the Career Gamers. We are told that these wasps are dangerous and that if stung by them the victim will end up hallucinating, severe swelling will occur and in some cases the victims will die. OK - one of the Career Gamers gets killed by the wasps and all the rest of them get stung multiple times, yet a couple of days later all the Gamers that have been stung are fine and seem to have been unaffected by the wasp stings -are we really expect to believe that?
The film did have its strengths; I thought that Jennifer Lawrence was fairly good in the lead role (although her character didn't have a great deal of depth, I found her character to be a fairly likable heroine who I actually started warming to). Woody Harrelson was great as the alcoholic mentor of Katniss and Peeta - his performance for me was the strongest.
To sum up then, the Hunger Games is a bit slow to get going and it definitely suffers from some scripting issues. It is also a bit weak on character development. The sequel Hunger Games; Catching Fire is now playing at the cinema. Will I be watching it? Probably; but I won't be rushing out to the cinema to see it.