Let them starve. That'd be more entertaining.

Rating: 1/10 (11 April 2014)

I have been assured that 'The Hunger Games' books are better than the films. After seeing an endorsement from Stephanie Meyer saying 'The Hunger Games is AMAZING!' and watching both of the films I can't say I'm convinced that it was ever a story worth telling, let alone filming.
Catching Fire is long, narcissistic, dumb, nonsensical, slow, and many other things.
American born actress Elizabeth Banks ends up sounding like an English person trying and failing to do an American accent rather than someone who naturally has one?
Lenny Kravitz as Katniss' fashion designer was the strangest piece of casting since Rihanna in Battleship. He gets beaten up just as Katniss is ascending into the game room, and like almost every other event in the movie you don't really find out why it happened. It is just an excuse to cue in Jennifer Lawrence for some more jaw out, mouth open, gurning at the camera. She looks like a bland office intern, rather than a seventeen year old firecracker.
There are many other unanswered questions. Why is the magical wire allowed into the game? Why is the game trying to kill the participants when the original point was for the Capitol to enjoy watching them kill each other? Why bother being sentimental by putting an elderly lady into the game to only then have her wander off into some poisonous mist and not be spoken about again? Why must Katniss stay alive to save her boring family? Are the answers in the book? Probably. Will finding the answers make the film any better? Probably not.
It's the kind of heavy handed allegory that eventually makes you feel like anyone portrayed as a victim in it probably deserves the fate they are dealt. The only saving graces are Philip Seymour Hoffman who rises miles above anyone around him, one scene that resembles Hitchcock's 'The Birds' and another that resembles 'Black Swan' which serve as reminders of bigger and better films that never felt the need to resort to the hero and heroine telling each other what their favourite colours are.
Green and orange apparently.