The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes review – back to an empty future
It’s easy to lose the will to live halfway through the title, never mind the actual film – in all its exhausting, convoluted silliness. This is a pointless new iteration of IP content from the Hunger Games franchise, based on Suzanne Collins’s original YA bestsellers, which over four movies from 2012 to 2015 confirmed the superstar status of Jennifer Lawrence, playing defiant heroine Katniss Everdeen, one of the starving people in a dystopian future state forced to take part in a bizarre televised survival contest. That initially fierce film series was subject to the law of diminishing returns, but they never quite diminished to zero.
For this prequel, however – taken from Collins’s 2020 novel of the same title – the interest, dramatic momentum and energy have frankly expired, and all we have are the ridiculous outfits, the hallucinatory hairstyles, the zero-suspense action sequences, the standard-issue CGI cityscapes, the nonsatirical flourishes about media control and Rachel Zegler (in what is effectively the Katniss role) doing a frankly bizarre suth’n accent in an eccentrically designed country-music-star dress, in her picturesque itinerant poverty, singing her down-home ballads while strumming a guitar which looks as expensive as a Lamborghini. For sure, Jason Schwartzman gets laughs playing the
Games’s oleaginous TV host and parttime weather forecaster Lucky Flickerman, but the humour of his role only seems to point up the baffling and strenuously uninteresting solemnity of everything else.
This is a prequel in which the titular songbirds and snakes are tropes symbolising beauty and vicious disloyalty, giving us the origin story of the state’s malign president, Coriolanus Snow, originally played by Donald Sutherland, as well as what is effectively the origin of the Games themselves as they were understood in the Katniss era. Sixtyfour years before the events of the first film, young Coriolanus (played by Tom Blyth) is one of a shabby-genteel distinguished family and at this stage is a decently intentioned young man who finds himself having to “mentor” one of the downtrodden contestants in the cruel games – this mentoring being a proto-reality-TV novelty intended to boost ratings.
Snow’s protege is Lucy Gray Baird (Zegler), the entirely preposterous