We had to dare to include songs in this new one Hunger Games with Rachel Zegler, Tom Blyth and Viola Davis!
With box office grosses approaching $4 billion, it should come as no surprise that the original Hunger Games quadrilogy is expanding to include a prequel episode about the youth, not Katniss Everdeen, portrayed in the previous installments. by Jennifer Lawrence, but on that of Coriolanus Snow, the heartless potentate of Panem, played brilliantly by Donald Sutherland. And the cinematic saga succeeded in giving the tyrannical character much more depth than Suzanne Collins had done in her novels.
Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of the Serpent and the Songbird. PHOTO PROVIDED BY MURRAY CLOSE/LIONSGATE
But that time is long gone. With “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of the Snake and the Songbird,” both the author and screenwriters Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt are overlong with 157 minutes of deadly “games,” as exciting as a nuclear physics course.
Because Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) lives with his grandmother (Fionnula Flanagan) and his cousin Tigris (Hunter Schafer) in a dingy apartment in the Capitol. The young Coriolanus wants to get out of post-war poverty for himself and his family at all costs and only dreams of attending university and rising to the top of the Panem hierarchy. But to achieve this, he must win the Hunger Games through the tribe he mentors, Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler) from District 12. And like Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage), the creator of the Hunger Games, and Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis). ), the game master, the rules are constantly changing, he has to be inventive and determined.
Peter Dinklage in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of the Serpent and the Songbird. PHOTO PROVIDED BY MURRAY CLOSE/LIONSGATE
Should we blame director Francis Lawrence for the poor acting? Because no one rises above the fray, with the exception of Jason Schwartzman, perfect as Lucky Flickerman, ancestor of Caesar, played by Stanley Tucci in the original quadrilogy. Everyone is expressionless and seems to have sunk into a paralysis from which nothing can emerge.
Both the plot and the dialogue are impressively flat, the political and social theme of the previous parts is replaced here by a race for box office money, the irony of which we will enjoy. As for special effects, there are none, as the technology was not invented for the later Hunger Games.
Viola Davis in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of the Serpent and the Songbird. PHOTO PROVIDED BY MURRAY CLOSE/LIONSGATE
What do we remember from those 2:37 hours? Not much, except for a big yawn, which is accentuated by the songs that Rachel Zegler’s bad luck gets to sing.
“The Hunger Games: The Ballad of the Serpent and the Songbird” opens in theaters across the province on November 17th.
Rating: 1 out of 5