Good story, poor film.

Rating: 4/10 (28 March 2012)

I haven't read the book but my brother and wife both loved it. The trailers made it look like "The Running Man", so had it not been for them I would have had no interest in this whatsoever.
Within the first ten minutes I thought the film was either directed by a woman or made for teen-aged girls based solely on the camera work and editing. The shots of Katniss were brief with shaky hand-held camera work, while the shots of Gale were needlessly long, smooth and drawn out. Also, I can't believe that a film with male audience in mind could ever make Elizabeth Banks ugly.
Katniss decides to volunteer to be a "tribute" so her little sister does not have to. They made it seem like being a tribute was a really bad thing, but didn't really give much explanation as to what it meant which really weakened what is a pretty central story point. Maybe they just assumed people would go in knowing that being a tribute meant being pitted in a mortal battle with peers, but it only took me one sentence to explain it, so they should have been able to find a way to squeeze it in.
So Katniss and Peeta are named as the tributes for their city -- which is called Sector 12. They are taken onto a train in a scene that is filmed as though they are prisoners being taken into a concentration camp, the only problem here is that the train is filled with lots of fancy food and luxury (something seldom found in concentration camps). So the film style tended to tell us contradicting things.
Peeta and Katniss arrive in a city full of weirdos that immediately made me think they were now in the land of OZ. Katniss then had a scrub-down which only reinforced the Wizard of Oz parallels in my mind. I'm all for homages, but they have to be subtle or they come off looking like a rip off, such as in this case.
The next part of the film is probably the hardest to sit through as it is a long, dry series of sequences where the tributes from the various sectors are interviewed and trained in preparation for the games. What makes this more frustrating is that the film skips over all of Peeta and Katniss's competitors. If the filmmakers thought they couldn't do it properly they shouldn't have attempted it at all. They did find time to waste with Katniss's farewells to the new friends she made (which also wreaked of Dorothy's farewell to her friends in Oz).
Now the games begin, and being a sucker for action movies I was really hopeful that this would turn the film around. Actually it did get better from this point on, but there was one major flaw that became apparent very quickly: The filmmakers were trying to make a PG-13 film about mass slaughter.
What that meant in this case was using annoyingly shaky hand-held camera work to try to camouflage the violence. It didn't make it intense or interesting, it just felt like another cop-out.
One by one the secondary characters die off while the world watches. One thing that did bother me a bit was when Katniss dropped a nest of wasps on a bunch of unwitting people below. It bothered me for a couple reasons: one was that these killer wasps didn't seem to affect Peeta, who was with the group below, and also because it's a well known fact that wasps will fly up... so the only thing that should've happened is that they would fly up and sting Katniss unmercifully.
Katniss befriends a young girl who reminds her of her little sister, but inevitably the young girl is knocked off. This leads to a bit of a rebellion in the young girl's home sector, which is, from what I know of the story, a precursor of future events. The rebellion scene was actually the one moment in the film where the story shone through and became easily the best scene of the film.
Katniss and Peeta team up for the final leg of the film and eventually outwit the game's creators by attempting a Romeo and Juliette type scheme of poisoning themselves. It's a little convoluted, but for some reason the show's brass seems to think that if these two both die they will beat them at their own game. Personally I'd let them die and then laugh.
So Peeta and Katniss are now global celebrities, which is another point that is not really clear... why would you make these peasants that you hate so much that you make their children fight to the death celebrities? Anyway, Gale, who has been watching the whole Peeta and Katniss romance blossom on television turns up and there is a hint given that Katniss is actually more interested in Gale... so what concerns me now, is that not only have these filmmakers savaged what was a pretty good story, but they've also pointed the sequel in the direction of Twilight, and there are already too many of those films.
I'm sure that some people who have already read the book(s) will enjoy seeing some of the things from coming to life, but I've always felt that the best adaptations make you want more, and a want to read the source material. This film did not do that for me, which is a bit of a shame because there are some good things in the story. If I were the author I'd be livid.