Satire for teenage girls

Robbie Collin
This a broad satire on the cut-throat world of reality television, made palatable for teenage girls with a Twilight love triangle: a Battle Royale with cheese, in effect, designed to be guzzled with fries and a milkshake. Both “The Hunger Games” and its sequel, “Catching Fire”, adapted from a series of young-adult novels by Suzanne Collins, do a fine line in blockbuster spectacle and seat-of-the-pants thrills —but they are tricky, strange, thought-provoking pictures, and they also make me want to use that worn-out and frequently misapplied word, “empowering”.

The story takes place in the classico-futurist kingdom of Panem, where an annual bread-and-circuses spectacle has teenagers competing for rations in a televised fight to the death.

The first film introduced us to Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), a bold 16-year-old who volunteers for the fight. By the start of “Catching Fire”, she is a champion, celebrity and role model — and trapped in the crowd-pleasing romance she concocted with Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), a fellow contender, while her secret boyfriend Gale (Liam Hemsworth) languishes on the sidelines.

President Snow (a brilliantly malign Donald Sutherland) is still in charge, but Katniss’ clever, rule-bending victory has made the populace itch for revolution.

Snow’s Machiavellian media chief (Philip Seymour Hoffman) suggests a simple solution: commission a special, all-star “The Hunger Games” that will bring Katniss back into the arena, where she will lose her reputation and then her life.

Lawrence’s own rise to prominence has been as fast and irresistible as Katniss’, and has barely slowed since February, when she won a Best Actress Oscar for “Silver Linings Playbook”. She’s magnetically watchable here, and is growing into the valuable kind of movie star who can wear ball-gown charisma as casually as a shrug. Francis Lawrence (no relation) takes up the directorial reins from Gary Ross, and makes the most of his leading lady’s insistent star power, even spoofing it in scenes where Katniss is interviewed by a sticky television host (Stanley Tucci) with a laugh as sweet and hollow as a chocolate egg.

The Tucci scenes could have been clipped from prime-time television almost unaltered, which is initially quite depressing: there is a moment when you suddenly realise you can hardly tell the difference between a bleak science-fiction dystopia and Saturday evenings on ITV.

But of course the likeness is intentional. Blockbusters that sell us distractions disguised as matters of life and death are so commonplace that

it’s a shock to see one doing the opposite, and “Catching Fire” wants its young target audience to recognise, and question, the stagecraft.
But the main threat is Katniss’ rivals, more Games veterans brought back into service.

Some of them make a bigger impression than others, but the most memorable — Jena Malone’s axe-swinging gladiatrix, Sam Claflin’s laboratory-reared heartthrob — all seem to be aware that even with death close at hand, they are still playing characters for the cameras’ benefit.

And at the centre of it all remains Katniss, with a cool head, a huntress’s nerve and a wit as dry as a tinderbox. She’s a complex and admirable young heroine in a business that’s crying out for more. Will the studios take notice? There’s a fire you hope will catch.