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Stories like this used to be all the rage. Remember that? A decade or so ago, at the height of wizards and muggles, Harry Potter’s unbelievable success led to an entire generation hungry for more fantastical worlds and where to find them. It was an epidemic that rivaled any pop culture takeover: the original runs of The Hunger Games (three books, four movies), Divergent (four books, three movies), The Mortal Instruments (six books, one movie), Percy Jackson (five books, two movies, an upcoming TV series), The Maze Runner (three books, three movies), and Chaos Walking (three books, one terribly-delayed movie), dominated nearly a decade of pre-teen zeitgeist.
Those pimply kids who begged their parents to drop them off to see these movies are now old enough to buy their own tickets — which must be at least some of the thought process behind The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, the prequel film based on the 2020 novel by original author Suzanne Collins.
It’s impossible to know how well that book really did, as it came out in the early weeks of a global pandemic, but Lionsgate knew that the original run of films were four of their five highest-grossing films in the company’s history (the other film is The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2 — which is an adjacent byproduct of the same era) and that was good enough for them.
A decade is a long time (absolutely enough time for a fad to come and go), but the folks behind Songbirds & Snakes are hoping that the long wait will lead to anticipation, leading to the release of this latest film to be another box office event. They’re certainly treating it like an event movie — with a runtime of 157 minutes, it tells the prequel story of how the Hunger Games became The Hunger Games.
Long before he was President Snow, Coriolanus (Tom Blyth) was just an ambitious (hungry, both literally and figuratively) teenager. Hoping to provide for his family, Coriolanus finds himself a mentor in the 10th Annual Hunger Games. However, this is before The Hunger Games were The Hunger Games that audiences know. They’re cheap, sleazy, gladiator-in-arena style melees that are over as soon as they begin — largely just punishment for the Capital uprising from years before. They aren’t spectacle yet. But Coriolanus is determined to make it one.
He’s assigned a female tribute from District 12 (if that sentence doesn’t make any sense to you, don’t bother because neither will the movie), Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), and although she should be doomed from the start, Coriolanus thinks he can make a celebrity out of her. After all, all great television shows need great characters, right?
Unfortunately, that’s also true of great movies, and Coryo and Lucy Gray could not be considered great characters. Director Francis Lawrence called Lucy Gray the ‘anti-Katniss’ and she isn’t written to be really anything else, just the opposite of the character that we all liked the first time around — the highest-grossing female action hero of all time. But Lucy Gray isn’t an action hero, she’s a singer. Just a normal gal. Zegler is unable to endow her with anything that lifts her from what is already on the page, other than a seemingly-optional Southern accent, (it’s often low-hanging fruit for a critic to comment on an actor’s accent work, but when it’s the only choice made and will disappear for entire scenes, it can’t go unchecked.)
Tom Blyth seems similarly allergic to choice, committing to such an allergy that audiences aren’t even treated to anything as immaterial as vocal inflection for all 157 minutes.
Director Lawrence helmed the last three of the original four films and I’m not sure if he’s improved as a technician in that time or if all involved agreed that 2023 audiences would be less forgiving of the stylistic choices that 2013 audiences endured. Whatever it may be, his work feels flat now (I audibly gasped at one moment when the camera moved because it was the first time in an hour that such a choice was made) and that complacency trickles down to his young cast.
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If saved by anything, the film is saved by its veteran actors, all turning in some of the silliest performances in their careers. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Viola Davis have fun before — she’s always excellent but has appeared largely in serious work. This filmography departure is welcome and she seems to be having a blast, complete with mad-scientist hair and two wacky eyes, as head gamemaker Dr. Volumnia Gaul. Jason Schwartzman has made a career of playing idiosyncratics (see any Wes Anderson movie) and he gets to do it again in another 2023 tentpole movie, (see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse), channeling the spirit of Stanley Tucci as the host of the television program, playing TV weatherman and amateur magician Lucretius ‘Lucky’ Flickerman. Peter Dinklage plays the most serious of the bunch, the alcoholic inventor of the Games, Casca Highbottom, but his character actor tendencies breathe life into his scenes with the younger actors.
Those who love The Hunger Games universe may very well still love this film despite its frustrating components. I was always under the impression that the most interesting part of The Hunger Games was The Hunger Games, but I seem to be in the minority on that one. Looking back, half of the original run of films didn’t even include The Games, (Mockingjay Part 1 is an action movie about filming television commercials.) When this film’s Games end, there’s still an hour of the movie left.
When action movies shy away from the action, it often seems like what little they do have (and, in this case, I do mean little) is boring for everyone involved. But you know what — maybe it is boring for them. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the action is just the means to an end. Maybe The Hunger Games isn’t about The Hunger Games. Maybe it’s just about an intense hunger (both literally and figuratively) and the games we play to get what we want and need.
If that’s what you liked a decade ago, you might still like it now — regardless of the trappings.
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes has a run time of 2 hours 45 minutes, and is rated PG-13 for strong violent content and disturbing material.
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