Captivating games

Jennifer Lawrence is utterly captivating in this excellent, albeit slightly repetitive, sequel to everybody’s favourite dystopic film about kids fighting to the death.

Descriptions of The Hunger Games as a teenage ‘Battle Royale’ do not do the film any justice and are actually slightly reductive. In fact, these films owe more to the taking off of teenage fiction than a film that came out 13 years ago. However, the thing that makes these films stand out is that, unlike Twilight, they’re actually pretty good, which those that have seen the first Hunger Games, or read the novels, can attest to.

So here we are at the much-anticipated second instalment of the Hunger Games trilogy Catching Fire and we rejoin Katniss and Peeta as they acclimatise to life after successfully outsmarting President Snow and his barbaric Hunger Games.

However, President Snow isn’t too happy about Katniss’ actions, which are unwittingly stirring up rebellion in the 12 districts of Panem and he, along with new head-gamesmaker Plutarch Heavensbee, set about trying to restore order to Panem and kill Katniss Everdeen, and naturally there’s no better way to do that than during another Hunger Games.

Donald Sutherland is fantastic as the softly spoken anodyne leader of the Capital, President Snow, truly excelling in his role as the major bad guy of the series, quietly and subtly threatening Katniss at every turn in a glacial, yet benign manner. However, not to be outdone his right-hand man Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Plutarch who shows a delightfully macabre intellect as he plots with Snow to bring down Katniss, his monologue about undermining her popularity by interspersing flogging with images of Katniss and Peeta’s wedding is superb.

I can’t tell whether having clear antagonists helped to make Lawrence’s performance of Katniss stronger, or whether Lawrence who is now an international sensation is just that good. Not only is she challenging Hollywood gender roles by being a female lead in a big budget action sci-fi movie in every way that Bella Swan wasn’t, but she’s genuinely terrific in a film where she is utterly compelling and really goes through the motions, I think she cries at least five times.

Everyone-else involved has also really upped their game. From the two love interests in Josh Hutcherson’s Peeta or Liam Hemsworth’s Gale who both have genuinely touching moments with Katniss. The rest of the entourage are also brilliant, including Woody Harrelson, Lenny Kravitz and Elizabeth Banks, who manages to make the absurd cartoonish Effy Trinket appear as one of the most empathetic characters in the whole film.

The pacing of the film, as well as the action, are all pretty much spot on, with the first half being devoted to displaying just how dystopic Panem is following the events of the last film, with director Francis Lawrence accurately depicting the simmering tensions of a potential uprising, helped immensely by a brief, yet commanding performance from Patrick St Esprit’s despotic peacekeeper Romulus Thread.

The second half sees Katniss and Peeta back in the Hunger Games arena, alongside newcomers like Beetee, Johanna and Finnick Odair, all of whom are winners of previous Hunger Games. Whilst the Games themselves are entertaining with all the different threats from the arena and the uneasy alliance that is formed, you’d be forgiven for feeling a slight sense of deja vu. This is because the first film followed a similar storyline, Katniss and Peeta get shipped around for half the film before entering the Games.

This is only a small criticism and really the only one that I have. Despite being similar to the first film the emotional stakes are higher, the physical stakes are higher, the acting is better and the storyline is tighter, so much so that I consider Catching Fire to be leaps and bounds above The Hunger Games if not for Lawrence’s performance alone.

* Showing in Cineco, Saar, Seef I