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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Film Review | The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
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Film Review | The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

A quiver full of surprises

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in a still from ‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’Premium
Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in a still from ‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’

Rebellion and revolt don’t often fly off the franchise shelf, but here is Katniss Everdeen in part deux of the post-apocalyptic fantasy action drama The Hunger Games, having an Arab Spring moment and landing an arrow or two in the name of liberty.

In Catching Fire, Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) isn’t fighting other teenagers any more in a retread of the games designed by the totalitarian regime of Panem to keep restive populations locked in constant combat and competition and entertain the decadent denizens of Panem’s headquarters, Capitol. Her combatants are grown-ups, and director Francis Lawrence’s movie accordingly amps up the gravitas. The division of the screenplay by Simon Beaufoy and Michael Arndt into equal halves statecraft and jungle survival saga allows Francis Lawrence to aim a double-headed arrow at the parents accompanying the adolescent target audience for Suzanne Collins’ best-selling fantasy fiction trilogy and its movie spin-offs.

It’s a lot for one character to take, and although Jennifer Lawrence remains a charismatically disturbed presence, she wears her severity too heavily. Her lack of litheness shows up far more in Catching Fire than in the prequel, and the script requirement to be stern and watchful robs her character of complexity. The other, more experienced cast members are far more effective, including Donald Sutherland as the suitably vile dictator Snow, Philip Seymour Hoffman as the smooth new designer of the games, Woody Harrelson returning as Katniss’ guardian Haymitch, Stanley Tucci’s superbly grovelling presenter, and dependable Hollywood character actors who pit their skills against her magically replenishing quiver.

Apart from the obvious but potent symbolism of the archer, Lawrence and the writers deftly use other metaphors, such as the showy fire-catching dress designed by Lenny Kravitz’s designer in the first part, which is deployed in part 2 to send Snow a message of defiance. It’s not all agit-prop. Trish Summerville’s nature-inspired costumes make the most of the transformation of Katniss’ wedding-white gown into the grey coat of the mockingjay bird (also a reference to the concluding part of the trilogy), and the butterfly-patterned and tropical forest-inspired dresses worn by Elizabeth Banks’ ditsy handler provide colour and levity to the mostly grim proceedings. The production design, as in the first one, mashes up Eastern Bloc miserabilia with Versailles-inspired gaudiness. The balance between genre requirements (the 146-minute movie has also been released in 3D and IMAX) and political sloganeering comes undone in the last hour, but the pile-up of spectacle-oriented contrivances can’t replace the power of the movie’s most simple image—the great unwashed in the bleak districts raising their hands in a three-fingered salute of hope.

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Published: 05 Dec 2013, 05:16 PM IST
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