The 18-year-old Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) — future president of Panem, eventual tormentor of Katniss Everdeen — begins “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” together with his abdomen growling. This slow-burning prequel by the franchise’s returning director Francis Lawrence rewinds six and a half a long time within the lifetime of the despot (performed within the different movies by Donald Sutherland) to search out young Snow tinkering with the tenth Hunger Games, a rinky-dink bloodbath hosted by a weatherman (Jason Schwartzman). (Katniss would endure the 74th.) Only its designer (Viola Davis) sees the potential in creating a Grand Guignol.
Aggrieved that the outer districts bombed his hometown and obliterated his household’s wealth, Snow is hungry and he’s enjoying two strategic video games. First, he should persuade his snobbish schoolmates that he belongs among the many Capitol’s well-fed elites. Second, he should ace his ultimate mission: Boost the blood tub’s scores by teaching a sacrificial tribute right into a telegenic star. As class assignments go, it’s a sweet bar fund-raiser mixed with caretaking a hard-boiled egg.
Fortunately, Snow is assigned a stunner named Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), the one woman within the coal-mining District 12 who wears mascara. Better nonetheless, upon being chosen for loss of life, Lucy Gray belts a bitter shanty. Surprise! This is (reasonably) a musical. Once we cease snickering, issues enhance. We even benefit from the later numbers by which Zegler, launched into fame as Maria in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” downshifts her Broadway pipes right into a reedy, expressive Dolly Parton twang.
Compared to Jennifer Lawrence’s stoic Katniss, Zegler’s Lucy Gray appears to be like and acts like a meringue — she’ll drizzle sugar throughout Snow to save lots of her life. We don’t purchase their first kiss, and the screenwriters Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt, working from Suzanne Collins’s 2020 novel, barely attempt to persuade us. Better scenes expose the delicate alliance between Zegler’s calculated Miss Congeniality and Blyth’s dystopian spin on Scarlett O’Hara, a blustering striver petrified that others will discover his tuxedo shirt has buttons made of loo tile.
By design, the gladiatorial sequences are a crumpled Xerox of the primary film. The gag is that they’re a low-budget prototype — “These drones are not very good!” Schwartzman yelps — however there’s no excuse to rehash a number of plot beats. The third act, nonetheless, is shrewd and gripping, even when the strongest components of Collins’s novels stay troublesome to movie. The child-on-child brutality have to be tamed to PG-13 whereas the knotty political cynicism would unspool smoother in a Ken Burns mini-series.
In lazier Y.A. tales, Chosen One saviors are championed; Collins argues that everybody is corrupt. Here, sneers of “rebel” and “terrorist” are hurled from either side, whereas Snow, raised to consider he’s a sufferer, by no means asks what his executed father may need beforehand executed to the districts. When the varsity’s new-money outcast (an empathetic Josh Andrés Rivera) dares query the established order, he’s pilloried.
Lawrence sketches the Capitol as an expanse of Stalinist blocks the place Peter Dinklage, enjoying the Games’s vengeful creator, skulks round dressed like Rasputin. The costumer Trish Summerville brings her personal addition to Lucy Gray’s rainbow rags: an embroidered flower bodice akin to the folks costume of Ukraine. Our world so hauntingly echoes Collins’s fictions that the movie, shot final summer season, strikes us to spend its gargantuan operating time reflecting on up to date headlines, mourning the generational tragedy of anger and worry begetting anger and worry.
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes
Rated PG-13 for largely cold youngster loss of life and disturbing content material. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. In theaters.
