The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013) - Review

As with most teen novels, I haven’t read the Hunger Games trilogy.  I own the first one, but never got past the first couple of chapters.  But speaking from the standpoint of a trilogy, you can’t get much better than the Star Wars OT.  And if Star Wars has taught me anything about filmmaking, it’s that the middle movie will be dark, it’ll be depressing, and it’ll be great.

* I know that The Hunger Games series will have four movies, but the point stands.

Unfortunately, while Catching Fire has some great ideas, it feels like it’s trying to be a bit too much of a retread of the first installment.  The biggest flaw in Collins’s story is that she felt the need to put a second “game” in.  So we’re treated to a bunch of setup which, while well-delivered, is basically just blunt force trauma railroading Katniss and Peeta into another deathgame.  I don’t think this was really necessary, and it doesn’t help matters that the Quarter Quell, as the game is called, feels less like a life-or-death situation this time and more like “we need to kill the superfluous characters we’ve set up in the first half of the movie”.

Sieg Heil!

There are some cool new additions, like ax-crazy Johanna (hey Jena Malone, where ya been?), and suave as hell Finnick, but most of the new cast seem trivial, and they are because some of them die pretty much immediately.

Where the movie shines is in its over-the-top caricatures; Elizabeth Banks, Stanley Tucci, and Woody Harrelson, backed by the one legitimately great performance from a much-hardened Jennifer Lawrence.  Despite this, Catching Fire feels like a stepping stone to the end of the series rather than a fully fleshed-out installment itself.