Show me the Hunger

Because I enjoyed the first Hunger Games film before reading the books, I was slightly worried that Catching Fire would fall prey to the “adaptations are always a disappointment if you’ve read the book” rule.

In fairness to the first film, it managed to stay admirably close to its source without coming across as clunky or bookish, so maybe it was the proverbial rule-proving exception. The second book, although a retread in many ways, does enlarge the canvas with resistance movements and other political manoeuvrings, pretty much ruling out such a close adaptation. Could it still meet expectations?

In Catching Fire, Panem - your typical post-catastrophe future dystopia in which humanity has failed miserably to learn from past mistakes - is on the verge of civil war thanks to our heroine Katniss Everdine’s actions at the end of the last Games. No revolutionary, Katniss just wants her family to be safe. Unfortunately, as mentor Haymitch points out, winning the Games becomes a life sentence in itself.

Therefore, after a frosty têtê-a- têtê with the unsubtly-monikered President Snow, Katniss is shunted onto a merry-go-round of victory tours and forced to make pretend googly eyes at drippy Peeta (whose parents were never the best spellers) despite her apparent feelings for miner-beefcake Gale (whose parents gave their poor son a girl’s name).

When the trip only serves to stoke the populace's insurrectionary fires, it won’t come as a huge surprise even to non-readers when the President sneakily bends the rules to throw Katniss back into the Games arena alongside a bunch of other previous winners, in the kind of superfight that boxing promoters are too lazy/corrupt to put on nowadays.

There are several reasons why Catching Fire matches its predecessor’s success. The change of directors hasn’t affected the visual style, Francis Lawrence wisely opting not to rock the boat and shooting with a lot of handheld cameras in bleached colours. The resulting realism elevates the material above cartoonier teen fare, and the contrast between the grim, wintery Districts and the Capital’s stomach-churning opulence could hardly be sharper. All of the violence hits home too, bringing to mind news footage of repressive regimes from across the globe, although the parallels with Apartheid-era South Africa are especially poignant given recent events.

Mind you, none of this would matter a jot without Jennifer Lawrence. It’s fascinating to watch such an extreme reversal of the usual gender stereotypes. Katniss oozes movie-star masculinity, right down to her evasive “you know how I feel about you” response when Gale expresses his love. The cad(dess)!

Male leads are allowed to be all emotionally constipated, stringing every woman along whilst still being irresistable to all - it’s how movies have worked for decades. That a female doing all this stuff doesn’t come across as preposterous is entirely down to Lawrence, who does brittle toughness as well as anyone regardless of gender. In the book, the love triangle stuff comes across as an obvious and rather tedious lift from Twilight, but Lawrence makes it work.

Catching Fire also brings comfort in repetition. The reaping, the parades, the superbly ghastly Cesar Flickerman chatshow segments, the training sessions, the Games themselves, all returning but with enough subtle changes to keep you on your toes. The returning cast are reliably solid (Stanley Tucci, having a ball again, is a particular highlight) and are augmented by an impressive batch of new faces including Jena Malone (what happened to her after Donnie Darko?) and the great Jeffrey Wright. And Willow Shields as Katniss’s sister Prim comes close to stealing every scene she’s in – to the point where I was surprised to find out that she’s not the daughter of Brooke, as she seems like such a natural young actress.

Despite all this, we must end on a note of caution: the third book is markedly different in structure and arguably considerably worse in quality, and yet in the wake of Potter and Twilight it’s being made into two films when it’s probably the least suitable of the trilogy to chopped and stretched in such a manner. So unfortunately there’s no guarantee that the two Mockingjay films will be any good. With J-Law at the forefront though and such an impressive supporting cast, at least they have a chance.