Poorly written, poorly executed, no character motivation, no reasoning, and no logic

Rating: 4/10 (7 February 2015)

After hearing this movie was better than "The Hunger Games" I was mildly excited. I liked the original Hunger Games, even though I didn't think it was a masterpiece, I still thought it was entertaining and mildly interesting. So I sat down and watched the movie and...
My goodness... rarely have I been so mad at a film.
Imagine a movie where none of the character's have true motivation, the enemy has no motivation, all of the scenes are random and pointless, characters are never fleshed out, the color palette is boring and dull, and everything is absurdly made... This... is Catching Fire.
The movie Catching Fire starts off a little while after the first movie where Katniss is attempting to have an emotional scene with her lover from District 12... this is one of the first main issues with the movie: All of the emotional scenes are either poorly acted or poorly directed. The movie is so bleak and emotionless that the actors try to act bleak and emotionless when there are emotional scenes, and it loses the general impact that it should.
Not to rip on Jennifer Lawrence (she has had some good parts in other films) but her character is so insanely one-dimensional and forced that it is almost unbearable to watch. This could the director's fault or it could be her fault, but either way it is really bad. The character "Katniss" never seems to actually feel or... how to say it... "think". Everything she does is spontaneous and forced. Here is an example: Katniss needs to be mad so we will make her randomly run off dramatically. Katniss needs to be showing an attitude so we will have her drink out of a bottle of alcohol. Katniss needs to care for Peeta so we will make her randomly make out with him. Katniss needs to have one-liners so we will make every SINGLE WORD SHE SAYS A ONE-LINER!!!
Starting to see a pattern? Katniss isn't a character in this film... she isn't even a human being... she is a plot-device just to have certain events happen. If the movie needs a sad scene then it will make up a reason for her to be sad. If the movie needs her to cry for no apparent reason it will find a bull-crap reason to make her cry. This becomes super frustrating because it makes her impossible to relate to. Who is Katniss? What is her personality? The answer is: Nothing. Her personality literally changes between scenes. In one scene she is Katniss and in the next scene she is drama-girl.
That is just one issue. The next big issue is the villains... and my goodness does this section fail hard. The bad guys in this series are just... too evil. There is nothing wrong with villains you love to hate, but this kind of becomes similar to the finale of Breaking Bad where the villains are simply too cruel and too unforgiving to really... understand. For example, someone raises their hand during a speech, gun him down immediately. Another example is where a military leader who is in charge of District 12 comes in and kills the old leader of District 12 for... no reason. It doesn't make any sense. The movie is trying to say "Look, he is cruel and unforgiving" but why on earth would he kill his own military equal? Just because the bad guys are BAD doesn't mean that they are illogical. A system where everyone kills each other on a whim wouldn't hold up for more than a couple of years and this has been supposedly going on for 75 YEARS!!!
And again, the villains in the movie have no motivation. Why are they evil? Because they are. Why do they kill? Just because. Why did they start a military campaign on District 12? Just to show that they are evil. The villains in this film repeatedly say "We want to give the people hope, so that they don't need a reason to rebel" however, throughout the entire film you see them destroying their hope. As mentioned before, the bad "Peacekeepers" go into District 12, start torching houses, and start destroying all pictures of loved ones...
WHY? THAT IS LITERALLY THE ONE WAY TO MAKE PEOPLE MAD! For bad guys who claim to want to "Control the people by giving them a little bit of hope" they are doing a bad job by crushing all of their hope... and then outright killing those people for no reason.
This is only the beginning for why this movie is so bad. Other annoying things are the fact that characters we have seen maybe for five seconds in the previous film are supposedly important now and have their own emotional scenes. This makes it awkward because there is an emotional scene with a character who we don't even know who it is. The movie is just a jumbled mess. It feels like someone read the book and said: Let's throw in random scenes from the book without any clear reason... we will just throw in random points from the book and hopefully the audience will understand.
All in all, this is a poorly directed film and is really boring/obnoxious to watch.