New Release Review: 'The Hunger Games: Catching Fire'

"If I want a movie that doesn’t end I’ll go to a French movie. That’s a betrayal of trust to me. A movie has to be complete within itself, it can’t just build off the first one or play variations."

So said the current reigning geek god, director Joss Whedon, when talking about Empire Strikes Back, but he might as well have been discussing Catching Fire; a movie with a long start, plenty of middle, but no discernible end.

Catching Fire picks up not long after Katniss and Peeta's surprise win (unless you happened to know the books are a trilogy, in which case it was markedly less surprising) in the first film. Katniss is now stuck playing up the fictional (or was it? *shrug*) romance that got the people of the Capitol to fall for her and Peeta, and that kept them both alive. Now an uprising is in the offing in the districts surrounding the Capitol, and Katniss must help quell it because it's somehow her fault - thanks to some very hazy logic - and the best way to do that is to convince the people that what she did in the arena was done out of love and not defiance.

Catching Fire is split roughly into two halves: the first sees Katniss trying to appease President Snow (Donald Sutherland) by convincing the districts that she really loves Peeta, the second, inevitably, details her return to the arena. It's during this stretch that Catching Fire is simply playing 'variations' (to again borrow from Whedon). The first film had the rather disturbing sight of children killing children; in the sequel it's the past winners who do battle, and they're not so young anymore. So instead it's just people killing people - which dials back the 'disturbing' somewhat. That this part of the film is at all affecting is almost entirely down to Jennifer Lawrence's faultless, and forceful, take on Katniss. Too many of the other actors fair less well: Sutherland underplays Snow's menace and comes off as a creep, rather than creepy; Philip Seymour Hoffman, as the mastermind behind the traps in the latest arena, seems to have wondered in off a completely different filmset (possibly a small quirksome indie film about waistcoat collectors); and Lenny Kravitz continues to be Lenny Kravitz. Which isn't exactly a criticism, but he does stick out a tad. Of the remainder most get short shrift and don't get to leave a mark, good or bad. Both Katniss's supposed love interests are given only a cursory amount of time (out of the fairly sizeable 2 hours and 26 minutes), suggesting that director Francis Lawrence is as disinterested in the Twilight-like love triangle as I am. More problematic is the fact that neither Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) nor Gale (Liam Hemsworth) are anywhere near as interesting as Katniss. They're noble and well meaning but have little else that defines them. So why be Team Gale or Team Peeta? Why not just be Team Katniss?

Balancing out the bad: there's the film's playful dissection of celebrity (which it unfortunately forgets about once the games begin), the special effects work from the perfectionists over at Weta (who have done a better job of realising the arena than Suzanne Collins, the author of the books, managed), a slightly unhinged Jena Malone as one of the returning winners, and Sam Claflin as the lantern-jawed Finnick Odair - who makes a bigger impression in his first 60-seconds on screen than either Hutcherson or Hemsworth have managed over the course of two films. Hell, he practically had me swooning. I realise I was essentially saying 'scrap the teams' earlier, but I do believe I'm Team Finnick.

Ultimately Catching Fire feels like a film of moments. Good ones. But they come round so very rarely.

Overall: 6/10