There’s a meme going around Facebook of a snapshot from Pulp Fiction showing John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson with the power font reading, “You know what they call The Hunger Games in Paris? Battle Royale with cheese.” Battle Royale is a Japanese movie from 2000 in which a class of 9th graders are placed on an island to fight to the death in the future, and it’s awesome in the way that only a certain class of Asian films can be. The Hunger Games is a Harry Potter/Twilight void-filler based on a 2008 novel by a young-adult fiction author who may or may not have seen the aforementioned Japanese flick and may or may not have thought it was a little too awesome to capture the hearts of American preteen girls and their moms.
Coasting on her strong performance in Winter’s Bone, Jennifer Lawrence is a dead-ringer for Katniss Everdeen (minus the olive complexion). Representing District 12, the poverty-stricken mining sector of the future dystopia of Panem, the pouty archer volunteers in place of her younger sister Prim as tribute in the Capitol’s annual oppression-cum-televised spectacle The Hunger Games, in which two members from each district are chosen to participate in a last-man-standing arena death match. District 12’s other tribute is the local baker’s boy, Peeta, whose admission to having a timeless crush on Katniss could be genuine, or is it a cunning strategy to get a leg up in the deadly games? As in the novel, the actual game portion of the film is both exciting and a major letdown, seeming at once too short and too tame to be the major draw of the movie. It’s The Walking Dead syndrome: unmet expectations, still watching (dammit!), ad infinitum.
Having already set the record for third biggest opening of all time (?!), it shouldn’t matter that the film suffers the same flaws and more as the novel, the most egregious being its unwillingness to explore the implications of its own dark subject matter. With less violence, less relevant dystopian allegories and less character development than the novel, The Hunger Games is like adding water to an already melted glass of Scotch on the rocks (hold the Scotch). Too easy to swallow.
