It’s an odd sort of movie: nothing really happens, although there’s a lot of activity. It’s as though there’s a plot, but no story. There are hints at dark doings behind everything – Donald Sutherland, as President Snow, does everything but twirl his moustache while figuring out how to ruin Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) so that she cannot become a focal point for rebellion.
I haven’t seen the first film, nor have I read the books, but this one holds up well enough as a stand-alone: backstory is filled in as appropriate (at least there’s no abrupt stop to the action while someone lectures us about how we got here). And the action scenes, of which there are a multitude, are well done. The trumped-up “romance” between Katniss and her fellow victor in the Games, Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) can’t seem to make up its mind whether it’s going to develop into something real or not – and there is the complication of what I assume is Katniss’ real love interest, Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth, who doesn’t have enough to do).
All in all, it’s really no more than a two-and-a-half hour set-up for the next movie (which itself, apparently, is going to come in two parts). The one clue, and it’s just barely that, is the character of the new Games Master, Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman) – you just know he’s playing a double game, but the film doesn’t give you anything solid to grab onto until the last five minutes. Also of note is Woody Harrelson as Haymitch Abernathy, a previous victor and Katniss’ mentor – he’s also a lot more than he seems, as we discover -- eventually.
And that's really the thing here: the whole story happens in the last five or ten minutes.
All in all, it’s a fairly entertaining couple of hours, but there’s no substance, and it’s fairly heavy-handed. I'm not inclined to see it again, unless I have raging cabin fever, and not all that interested in seeing any of the others.
PG-13, 146 minutes.
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