Should you watch this at weekday movie ticket prices? No.
Should you watch this for free? No, but you may wish it upon your worst enemy.
Secret ending? No.
Running time: 146 minutes (2.5 hours)
“The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” is a science fiction movie about a futuristic dictatorship that holds regular lethal gladiatorial contests for some unfathomable reason. It stars Jennifer Lawrence, Woody Harrelson, and Liam Hemsworth.
It is an absolute turd of a film. I didn’t read the book, but if you have to read the book in order to understand what is happening, then it has failed as a movie, and consequently wasted millions of dollars on an indecipherable story.
But let’s be positive. What is good about this film?
(Image from HD Wallpapers)
Action
In the Third Act. There are fights and monsters and set pieces meant to kill our heroes. This builds up something called suspense, but it is artificially done in the sense that it’s a matter of someone’s life at stake, rather than suspense because you care about the fate of the characters.
(Image from Fanpop)
And that’s about it. Let me go on to why you should not watch this film, or rather, why you should use it as a special kind of Hell reserved for your archenemies.
The pacing is disgusting
It’s written by Simon Beufoy and Michael Arndt. They’ve done good screenplays before. So what happened to this one? I can only imagine it was executive meddling or an ignoramus of a producer.
The first two Acts of the film are a melodramatic soap opera that nobody cares about. It drags on like a crippled geriatric with no walking aids, with no obvious aim or direction. It’s literally showing you the lives of our two heroes in every unwanted excruciating detail, except that I’ve seen reality shows that do a better job of this. And it only gets mildly less boring when they somehow get pulled into the next iteration of the Hunger Games, which brings me to my next problem.
The set up for the next Hunger Games is atrocious
Why exactly is this happening? I get it that it’s the capricious whims of an evil dictator. But why not let the fault fall squarely on the shoulders of the bad guy? Why do you need to give heaps of exposition justifying that the new Hunger Games has been written into the rules? Why did nobody see this coming if it’s happened before? Did every Hunger Games winner get gifted an Idiot Ball as a prize?
And everyone’s reaction is so trite and forced. You could have seen it coming a mile away. I know that the name of the movie is called “The Hunger Games” but really, this is just too artificially done. Perhaps the book handles it better.
The climax isn’t properly executed
The movie just ends. As in, the Hunger Games just end with no foreshadowing, build up, or any signposting at all. Suddenly, it ends. And then the movie ends.
There is a cliffhanger, sure, and that doesn’t mean that a movie has ended badly if there is a cliffhanger. But surely we could have been given some indication, or there could have been accumulated gravitas to create some sort of finality in the ending?
Nope. You’ve been getting trash the whole film – why would it stop spouting garbage at this point?
The two main characters are not sympathetic
They are portrayed as whiny brats. The problem is not with their performance, which is adequate. The problem is with the plot, what they do in particular situations, their reactions, and their dialogue.
Why would you care if they die, in that case?
(Image from digntaswpp)
Ultimately, the problem with this movie is that it was very, very badly adapted from the book (which I have not read). It isn’t produced or adapted with the needs of a film medium in mind. I don’t know if it was a slavish recreation of the book, but this is probably the worst waste of my money, and the worst movie, of 2013.
And Cineleisure has gigantic posters from this craptacular movie splayed everywhere, but no Christmas tree.
Cineleisure.
Why.
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