The Hunger Games: The Bal­lad of Song­birds & Snakes – lop­sided prequel

Good film­mak­ing is all about know­ing when to stop. Yes, there are cool cam­era moves and killer line read­ings and bliss­ful moments of high dra­ma, but if at the end of the day a film out­stays its wel­come, then all of those lit­tle wins count for nothing.

Fran­cis Lawrence’s The Hunger Games: The Bal­lad of Song­birds & Snakes out­stays its wel­come big time – a ser­vice­able B‑movie which replays the series’ inher­ent­ly-quite-excit­ing fight-to-the-death sto­ry­line, but then inel­e­gant­ly bolts on an extra hour of vapid soul search­ing and lore expan­sion that made this view­er want to blud­geon him­self with his own keep cup.

For those fol­low­ing, this new film, which arrives some eight years after Kat­niss Everdeen wrapped things up in The Hunger Games: Mock­ing­jay – Part 2, is a Phan­tom Men­ace-esque pre­quel which tells the ori­gin sto­ry of young, love­ly, kind­ly, stu­dious, pover­ty-strick­en Core­olanus Snow, played Tom Blythe, and how he grows up to become the marked­ly more charis­mat­ic evil­do­er, Don­ald Suther­land, from the orig­i­nal saga. And even though the film appears to go through great pains to explain this for­ma­tive embrace of the dark side, it’s done in a way that’s so obscure and arti­fi­cial that it makes pre­cious lit­tle sense.

We join mat­ters at the point where the annu­al Hunger Games are stuck in a bit of a rut from a TV audi­ence per­spec­tive. As this is the ear­ly years, the unlucky ​“trib­utes” now duke it out in a closed col­i­se­um, and Snow along­side the esteemed mem­bers of his grad­u­at­ing class are told that there’s one final task to com­plete before a cov­et­ed schol­ar­ship is award­ed: they must men­tor the trib­utes and goad them into being more enter­tain­ing. Snow is paired with a sassy war­bler from Dis­trict 12 named Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) who likes noth­ing more than to express her­self through song. Repeatedly.

One thing here that’s prob­lem­at­ic is that even the games them­selves seem dull, so it’s quite a stretch to accept that they would’ve become a cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non in their time. Watch­ing ama­teurs fight­ing is actu­al­ly very tedious and is over very quick­ly: just ask Har­mo­ny Korine who attempt­ed to make (and then sage­ly aban­doned) an entire fea­ture film in which he’s beat­en up by strangers.

Else­where we’ve got Jason Schwartz­man goof­ing around as the new Hunger Games live TV anchor, and there’s a scenery-chew­ing Vio­la Davis in cracked make-up and gar­ish design­er duds as the loopy sci­en­tist who every year is charged with keep­ing the game tick­ing. Both do well to keep things live­ly while they’re on screen, but their pres­ence is dou­ble-edged, as the film dies a death when they’re swept aside before the soul-sap­ping final act kicks off.

It’s strange for a film which, up to a point, seems to be offer­ing a sly cri­tique on mar­ket­ing, media manip­u­la­tion and pan­der­ing to the basest instincts of an audi­ence in the craven search for rat­ings, to swerve so fate­ful­ly into ter­rain which unequiv­o­cal­ly tests the patience of even the most hard­ened of Hunger Head. The ques­tion, then, is why do we get this extra­ne­ous chunk of film served up to us in the first place?

Well, it’s all to do with a mis­guid­ed belief born in the board­room that audi­ences love fran­chise con­nec­tiv­i­ty. Rather than leave some­thing poet­i­cal­ly unsaid, to mar­i­nate in the imag­i­na­tions of the view­er, a film like this is all about per­nick­ety gap-fill­ing and expo­si­tion­al clo­sure, because that, appar­ent­ly, is what the peo­ple want. It’s a leap to think any­one gen­uine­ly cared about the ear­ly years of the Hunger Games antag­o­nist any­way, but this film sits awk­ward­ly between a water-test­ing spin-off mini fran­chise, and an attempt to cram every­thing there is into a sin­gle sit­ting – enter­tain­ment be damned!

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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