Review: Why Hunger Games prequel, The Marvels are doomed

While The Marvels is not the “worst Marvel-made movie of all-time”, it does rank among the most disposable effort to carry the brand, writes Leigh Paatsch.

Tom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow and Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray Baird in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Photo Credit: Murray Close

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (M)

Director: Frances Lawrence (I am Legend)

Starring: Tom Blyth, Rachel Zegler, Viola Davis, Peter Dinklage.

Rating: **

A meal that is all filling, no flavour

Is there really any appetite out there for a reheated serving of The Hunger Games?

The polite answer to this question is a soft maybe. The actual answer for most people will be a hard no.

The original quartet of Hunger Games fixtures starring Jennifer Lawrence started out as a global sensation, but ended as a fans-only affair.

The world had tired of too many movies trading in themes of torrid teen dystopia, and quickly shifted its attention elsewhere.

However, just eight years after making its booting from the box-office big league, The Hunger Games wants to be let back in.

Unfortunately, as hard as the new movie pounds on the front door of our collective affection, it never persuades you to release all locks and permit entry.

The problem here is what The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes mistakenly thinks will rekindle the enthusiasm of a disillusioned audience.

Of all the directions the franchise could possibly take, an origin story for sinister Panem President Coriolanus Snow (played in the original movies by Donald Sutherland) is one of the least appealing.

Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray Baird and Tom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes. Photo Credit: Murray Close

Nevertheless, that is the underwhelming concept Hunger Games novelist Suzanne Collins chose to develop a few years ago, and that is why a faithful movie adaptation like The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is doomed to fail from the outset.

Put simply, learning all about what put the young and impressionable Coriolanus (played by British actor Tom Blyth) on a privileged path towards a life of politically mandated evil is a patience-killing, bum-numbing exercise.

As the time frame explored here has been moved back quite a few decades, the Hunger Games are still in their infancy as a televised tournament of death.

While the event’s deranged designer Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis) and her belligerent second-in-command Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage) refine the rule book for the carnage yet to come, the Panem posh boy Coriolanus forms an ungainly alliance with a pretty and poor Games player from District 12.

Her name is Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), and when she isn’t running for her life in the Games arena or fluttering her eyes at Coriolanus, she is grabbing the nearest guitar and singing country-and-western ballads like there is no tomorrow.

And at a punishing running time of over two and a half hours – during which the movie switches between overcomplicating a simple premise and overstaying a slender welcome – it often feels as there never will be a tomorrow.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is in cinemas now.

Rosamund Pike in a Scene from the movie Saltburn.

SALTBURN (MA15+)

***1/2

General release.

While this caustic blend of drama, black comedy and creepy character study won’t win its talented writer-director Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman) a vast new following, it is the kind of edgy, risk-taking fare we could use more of these days. A twisty, turny storyline follows a formative first year at Oxford for Ollie (Barry Keoghan), a scholarship student having trouble fitting in with his rich-kid peers. That is until he becomes the wingman of the most connected and charismatic figure on campus, Felix (Jacob Elordi).

After tragedy strikes Ollie’s family, Felix cheers up his sad-sack buddy by inviting him to spend the summer at his ancestral rural estate. At this point, the ‘real’ movie Saltburn wants to be is gradually revealed, and what it intends to show you (particularly when it comes to the idle rich and the fluidly promiscuous) will not be to everyone’s taste. Nevertheless, the movie steps in and out of the don’t-go-there zone with admirable abandon. Sometimes amusingly, and every so often, a little too obnoxiously. While some won’t forgive the movie for going too far, no-one will forget the movie any time soon. Co-stars Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant.

Brie Larsen as Captain Marvel in The Marvels. Picture: Marvel Studios

THE MARVELS (M)

**

General release.

Though The Marvels doesn’t quite live down to the ferocious, first-day trolling of the picture as the “worst Marvel-made movie of all-time”, it does rank among the most needlessly cluttered, confused and disposable effort to carry the Marvel brand. Relative newcomers to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and just as crucially, those who have never watched MCU streaming spin-offs such as Ms. Marvel and WandaVision) will particularly struggle to follow what is going on here. Much of the movie is chewed up by scrappy scene-switching that sees Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), Kamala Khan/Ms Marvel (Iman Vellani) and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) suddenly swapping spots whenever their superpowers are released in certain ways. Though proceedings do improve once we reach a relatively coherent final act, the weak chemistry between the three leads never gets any better. Co-stars Samuel L. Jackson.

Originally published as Review: Why Hunger Games prequel, The Marvels are doomed