THE HUNGER GAMES: Boring, disconnected, and all-around pointless

Rating: 1/10 (14 April 2012)

If at any point in your miserable existence you considered watching this, consider something else. Like suicide.
I was quite shocked to find out after watching the movie that people actually thought this was good. Hollywood releases crap on a weekly basis, but this was terrible. I also found out it was based on some books which were popular with teenage girls or something. Had I known that, I would have skipped it for sure.
It was one of the most boring films I've seen in theaters in a long time. Even worse when you consider it's 2+ hours long (and will feel like twice that) and poorly made. It moves along at a snail's pace. Occasionally the camera shakes, it speeds up a little and is edited poorly to give the illusion of action. Ah, PG-13.
Watching this movie is about as boring as waiting in your doctor's office with all those crappy outdated magazines then painful because the doctor happens to be a proctologist. It brought up memories of films with similarities, however remote, with THG. It's like a combination of BATTLE ROYALE, THE RUNNING MAN, GLADIATOR, TWILIGHT... Wait, TWILIGHT? Combining anything with TWILIGHT will end in disaster.
One of the main characters' names is Peeta. Not Peter. I thought Lawrence's character was retarded or really wanted a pita. Was Peter too lowbrow for you? You know this work is going to be over-dramatic and overserious when the author has to work at some of these names here. Coriolanus? Now you're inadvertently reminding me of Shakespeare, too. We get it, it's supposed to mirror Ancient Rome, gladiatorial combat, whatever. Your work can hearken back to the past without being explicit about it. SUBTLETY, WHAT'S THAT?
This film has a talent of featuring reputable actors who do nothing. I get this weird feeling that Woody Harrelson was genuinely drunk because he realized what a terrible film he was in. At least, I hope he was. Donald Sutherland shows up, is barely used and is almost like a punchline in this joke of a film. The film itself basically accomplishes nothing. I don't buy the 'sequel' defense. A film should stand on its own; also, I'm even less interested in watching a sequel. Plus, that basically paints Hollywood as a bunch of money-grubbing douchebags. Oh wait...
They also introduce plot points that go nowhere. There are cameras that monitor the contestants. At first I thought it was going to be like THE RUNNING MAN where they end up subverting the population into revolt. That sort of happens after a little girl dies and it's supposed to be emotional because it's a little girl but I could really care less. I actually laughed. A bunch of people in her 'district' see this and they start rioting. And then nothing. It's never ever brought up again. At the very end, the two main characters survive, and they've changed the rules and nature of the game or something, and you get the feeling it's supposed to be important, but it's not. The movie ends on a flat note. The whole movie is like that, it just goes on for awhile and then stops.
The general story and its universe are easy to understand. But some things seem to come out of nowhere, sometimes disrupting the flow. There's how the game's overseers can interfere by blowing things up and setting things on fire. By the end, there are huge mutated dogs sprouting out of the ground and they expect us to go along with it. If you have no idea what's going on and why there are all of a sudden dogs coming out of nowhere (basically meaning that if you didn't read the books) you'll be completely taken out of the film, wondering if one of the employees spiked your drink with acid or if the movie is really THAT stupid. The overseers actually look like they're genetically altering dogs. So basically in this future you can create mutated dogs during a game show. And then make them disappear just as quickly. Okay.
The big problem is tonal shifts from scene-to-scene are so jarring that it completely takes you out of the film. It's like the movie is experiencing these strange mood swings. It's also way too serious. As a result a lot of scenes end up being unnecessarily cheesy or unintentionally funny. Young 'actors' trying to act tough. Kids dying. Stanley Tucci looking like an over-sized Oompa-Loompa. I took pretty seriously a man dressed as a bat fighting a guy in clown makeup, so I guess they just failed here.
There isn't an underlying mood or tone that holds the film together. It's not that you can't splice different scenes together to make a proper narrative and hold a proper tone. Unfortunately, this director and his crew are so incompetent that they did a horrible job. It shouldn't be THAT hard. It's a straight forward story aimed at teenagers. I don't even know what they were going for. An undercurrent of sadness? Being overwhelmed like the protagonists? It's hard to tell.
I'll just end this with the romance, which I gather is supposed to be one of the real focuses, but feels like it's just shoehorned in there. It's poorly conceived, even poorly executed. It's cheesy. And unbelievable. It seemed to me like some really overlong and boring fan fiction some teenage girl would write. I was almost right. It was actually written by a middle-aged woman. RUN FOR THE EXITS.
But yeah, the entire movie ends up feeling like they were trying to splice together footage from three different sources. Seriously, that's gotta be pretty bad when your film ends up feeling like what Godfrey Ho actually does.