2013: The Year in Film: "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire" Review

The first "Hunger Games" film was a flawed, yet effective effort to bring the best-selling young adult book series to life. It featured a powerhouse cast, including the always great Jennifer Lawrence as the lead, but its slavish devotion to the source material ultimately robbed the film of its emotional punch. The movie was simply too concerned with getting the details right to focus on the importance of making an effective stand-alone piece of media.  Additionally, by and large the world was not sufficiently developed. We're taken to this place and shown things, but the film by and large feels like it's just happening with little emotional resonance. A lot of this was due, no doubt, to the first book being the least cinematic of the trilogy, with a lot of the action taking place in Katniss' head. Jennifer Lawrence is a spectacular actress, but even she can only do so much with a story that underplays the book series' greatest strength: the world and political tension therein.

Enter: "Catching Fire". The question is: would the powers that be behind this incredibly lucrative (the first Hunger Games made $400 million at the domestic box office) film series improve on a promising start and fix the rather obvious and seemingly simple issues? Or would they rest on their laurels, content to bank hundreds of millions on as little effort as possible? The answer, thankfully for we the audience, is that with a new director (Francis Lawrence taking over for Gary Ross) and a higher budget, Lionsgate would step up to the plate, and give us a film befitting its star.

In "Catching Fire", Katniss finds herself and her world reeling from the events of the first film. Her defiance of the capital has led to rising discord among the districts, and her new-found celebrity and notoriety has her every action scrutinized by President Snow and the power brokers in the capital. She, being the naive bumpkin that she is, wishes that everything would return to "normal", but it soon becomes clear that that can never be the case. A curveball in the form of a "Quarter Quell" means that Katniss and Peeta find themselves returning to the arena, with the stakes even higher the second time around.

The Good: Jennifer Lawrence, as she's been in every single thing that I've seen her in, is simply tremendous.  Her performance in this film is one of the better performances I can recall in a big budget blockbuster, a subtle portrait of trauma and its aftermath, really grounding the otherworldly nature of the proceedings in a decidedly human way. The rest of the cast seems to have stepped their game up as well, (RIP, Philip Seymour Hoffman!) with the stakes feeling much, much higher this time around. The higher budget was really put to work as well, with the world feeling much more fantastic and immersive. The world at once seems grittier and prettier to look at, and that's no easy task.



The Bad: Again, Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson have negative chemistry. I'm inclined to blame Hutcherson for this, since he probably won't be working in any capacity in another 5 years, but whoever is to blame for it, it really detracts from the overall strength of the story and that's really going to be an issue in the final installments of the series. Look at JLaw's scenes with Lenny Cravitz. They CRACKLE, man. Hutcherson just sort of mealy mouths around, likely sad that he's 3 inches shorter than his "love" interest. Not good stuff, Lionsgate. Additionally, despite the fact that the improved budget really expanded the world, there's still the issue of what, exactly, is going on in Panem. Is this a problem with the source material? YOU BET. But, it appears that Panem is all of the US and quite possibly all of North America, right? District 12 appears to be Appalachia... and has a population of, what? 5,000? I'm confused as to what happened to everyone. EXPLAIN, Suzanne Collins.

Ultimately, as far as sci-fi dystopian blockbusters go, you could do much, much worse than "Catching Fire". Jennifer Lawrence is one of the 3 best actresses working today, and she really knocks this one out of the park. This one is in every way better than the first Hunger Games film, and well worth a watch if you're into this sort of thing at all.

8/10.