The Game of a Girl’s Future

Katniss Everdeen is in a bad place at the start of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

Following the events of the first, Gary Ross-directed Hunger Games, a.k.a. the film that turned Katniss’ portrayer Jennifer Lawrence into a worldwide superstar, the brave archer from Panem’s District 12 is, let’s see: quite estranged from baker boy Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), her weak-by-comparison partner – in strategy and for-the-cameras romance – from the 74th annual Hunger Games; stressed out by the upcoming Victory Tour she and Peeta must embark on to keep up their new we-are-Capitol-stars-and-a-darling-couple façade, as well as its effect on her relationship with the noble miner Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth); as well as openly threatened by her tyrannical president, Snow (Donald Sutherland), who is increasingly worried about what she has come to represent.

All this not to mention she is also haunted by what it took to win the game of her life.

Taking the 74th annual Hunger Games, the televised to-the-death tradition instituted as a means to keep the people in check, was meant to provide Katniss with peace, with a future. Instead, at the eve of the 75th games, she finds nothing but grief surrounds her, and further potential danger lurks for hers and her beloved district.

Katniss, you see, has become a symbol of hope for Panem. Her defiance at the end of the first film did more than just save both her neck and Peeta’s: it awoke something in the nation. Gale has seen it. Katniss’ younger sister (Prim, played by Willow Shields), in whose stead Katniss volunteered herself as tribute to the games the year before, sees it, as do others close to the Girl on Fire.

A revolution is coming, but our heroine hasn’t quite grasped the idea.

As this second installment in a planned four blockbusters based on Suzanne Collins’ hit series of books begins, new-to-the-fold director Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend) spends a considerable amount of time transitioning us from the previous film and toward the first of the two that will make up The Hunger Games: Mockingjay. (Seems to me he has taken the criticisms of the first film and plugged those holes, so to speak, by allowing us invest more not only in the main characters but in their world. So kudos for that.)

Sensing that his threat has done little to make Katniss fall in line, Snow decides that the upcoming third Quarter Well (that is, the 75th games) will be extra special and summons every past living victor back for more. The idea is to throw Katniss into a pit of experienced killers and thus kill Panem’s hope.

So before it takes us into a tropical arena filled with, among others, 22 tributes that know one another, poisoned fog, vicious monkey mutts, and blood rain, the film’s creative brain trust raises the stakes. So Katniss will not just be fighting for her life in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire; unbeknownst to her, she will be fighting for her people’s freedom.

Once again, she will have to navigate the metaphorically treacherous waters of the Capitol with her mother-figure showbiz handler Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) and Woody Harrelson’s invaluable Haymitch Abernathy, her and Peeta’s mentor. Along the way, she will meet the Games’ new gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a man who is both more and less than what he appears to be, and strive to make allies out of tributes past, like the trident-as-weapong favoring Finnick Odair (Sam Claflin) and the intense, ax-wielding Johanna Mason (Jena Malone), both of whom make welcome additions to the action.

It will not be easy to survive these games. In fact, as you’ll see, it will be particularly difficult. The deck is stacked against Katniss in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Everything you see tells you as much.

What surprises about this one is exactly what you don’t see coming, and, when it comes to the acting, what is transmitted with very little said. Let me focus on J. Law for this topic, for she is the star of the film.

The actress, like her character, is in flux in this chapter of the story. We know she can handle herself, but what we know, what the Oscar winner knows but Katniss doesn’t fully understand yet, is that the Girl on Fire is the key to a whole new world. Lawrence does a beautiful job of telegraphing these conflicted emotions swirling within our heroine, who’s stuck between fighting of flighting.

And I can only imagine that come time for the end, Katniss will rise from the fire consuming her at the end of this film just like…the active-in-her-fate mockingjay we know she is about to become.

My Rating ***

Photo: Lionsgate Films.