Good filmmaking is all about knowing when to stop. Yes, there are cool camera moves and killer line readings and blissful moments of high drama, but if at the end of the day, a film outstays its welcome, then all of those little wins count for nothing.
Francis Lawrence’s The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes outstays its welcome big time – a serviceable B-movie which replays the series’ inherently-quite-exciting fight-to-the-death storyline, but then inelegantly bolts on an extra hour of vapid soul searching and lore expansion that made this viewer wand to bludgeon himself with his own keep cup.
For those following, this new film, which arrives some eight years after Katniss Everdeen wrapped things up in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2, is a Phantom Menace-esque prequel which tells the origin story of young, lovely, kindly, studious, poverty-stricken Coreolanus Snow, played Tom Blythe, and how he grows up to become the markedly more charismatic evildoer, Donald Sutherland, from the original saga. And even though the film appears to go through great pains to explain this formative embrace of the dark side, it’s done in a way that’s so obscure and artificial that it makes precious little sense.
We join matters at the point where the annual Hunger Games are stuck in a bit of a rut from a TV audience perspective. As this is the early years, the unlucky “tributes” now duke it out in a closed coliseum, and Snow alongside the esteemed members of his graduating class are told that there’s one final task to complete before a coveted scholarship is awarded: they must mentor the tributes and goad them into being more entertaining. Snow is paired with a sassy warbler from District 12 named Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) who likes nothing more than to express herself through song. Repeatedly.
One thing here that’s problematic is that even the games themselves seem dull, so it’s quite a stretch to accept that they would’ve become a cultural phenomenon in their time. Watching amateurs fighting is actually very tedious and is over very quickly: just ask Harmony Korine who attempted to make (and then sagely abandoned) an entire feature film in which he’s beaten up by strangers.
Elsewhere we’ve got Jason Schwartzman goofing around as the new Hunger Games live TV anchor, and there’s a scenery-chewing Viola Davis in cracked make-up and garish designer duds as the loopy scientist who every year is charged with keeping the game ticking. Both do well to keep things lively while they’re on screen, but their presence is double-edged, as the film dies a death when they’re swept aside before the soul-sapping final act kicks off.
It’s strange for a film which, up to a point, seems to be offering a sly critique on marketing, media manipulation and pandering to the basest instincts of an audience in the craven search for ratings, to swerve so fatefully into terrain which unequivocally tests the patience of even the most hardened of Hunger Head. The question, then, is why do we get this extraneous chunk of film served up to us in the first place?
Well, it’s all to do with a misguided belief born in the boardroom that audiences love franchise connectivity. Rather than leave something poetically unsaid, to marinate in the imaginations of the viewer, a film like this is all about pernickety gap-filling and expositional closure, because that, apparently, is what the people want. It’s a leap to think anyone genuinely cared about the early years of the Hunger Games antagonist anyway, but this film sits awkwardly between a water-testing spin-off mini franchise, and an attempt to cram everything there is into a single sitting – entertainment be damned!
Little White Lies is committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them.
ANTICIPATION.
Were we hankering for another Hunger Games movie eight years after the originals wrapped? 3
ENJOYMENT.
Half surprisingly decent, half turgid nightmare. 2
IN RETROSPECT.
Bad, in a surprising, unique way. 1
Directed by
Francis Lawrence
Starring
Rachel Zegler, Tom Blyth, Viola Davis
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