Perhaps it’s due to the retention of director Francis Lawrence, who helmed the four previous Hunger Games films, but this prequel—drawn from the novel by series creator Suzanne Collins—retains the hard edge that made most of those movies register as piercing satires of our reality-television age, rather than hypocritical exploitation flicks. In The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, we go back to the youth of eventual Capitol dictator President Coriolanus Snow, yet it’s the depiction of the crude, relatively young Hunger Games themselves (the 10th iteration) that’s more fascinating. At this early stage, the games consist of little more than throwing a bunch of emaciated district tributes in a barren ring. The competition is in dire need of some entertaining innovation—innovation the aspiring Snow (Tom Blyth) is willing to provide. (He’s a variation on whoever thought we needed a Golden Bachelor.) The story tries to complicate things a bit by giving Snow a soft spot for his tribute, spitfire singer Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), who hails from District 12, but neither Blyth’s performance nor the brisk screenplay allow for that level of character development. As for Zegler, she brings energy but still can’t completely escape the blandness that also limited her debut as Maria in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. As in that musical, Zegler sings with confidence and competence. That was enough for Maria, a character who has always been something of a cipher. But as a progenitor for Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen, Lucy Gray Baird should have more bite. Also featuring Viola Davis, Peter Dinklage, and Jason Schwartzman, all delightfully hamming it up in the adult roles.
(6/18/2024)
