The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes (PG13)

157 minutes, opens on Thursday

3 stars

The story: Sixty-four years before the events of dystopian actioner The Hunger Games (2012), future despot Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) is an 18-year-old student. It is the 10th edition of the Hunger Games, deadly contests designed to humiliate the districts that rebelled against The Capitol. Coriolanus is given the task of mentoring Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), a girl from a poor district sent as Tribute. His job is to help her survive the games, but his motives might be more sinister than he lets on, after he falls under the spell of game designer Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis), who rigs the events to ensure the state-approved Tribute wins. Adapted from the 2020 novel of the same name by Suzanne Collins.

In The Hunger Games books, author Collins created a world in which grown-ups treated the young as a disposable resource. Through gladiatorial fights arranged by older people, kids and teens bleed to keep the state satisfied.

That central idea – that the system is rigged against the young – is carried through in the new prequel, despite the main character being Coriolanus, a highly privileged teen. He is as much a pawn as Lucy, the Tribute he is mentoring.

The story this time ramps up the action and brutality. Death can happen to anyone. The regime imposes its will on Tributes callously, making this a rare movie that claims to be set in an authoritarian dystopia, and follows through on it.

Director Francis Lawrence – who helmed the second film Catching Fire (2013) and subsequent films in the original series, Mockingjay Part 1 and 2 (2014 and 2015) – does what he can to make the story feel whole, because it seems as if Coriolanus’ journey has only just begun by the film’s conclusion. (Ballad is so far the last book in the series, so the fate of follow-up movies is unknown.)

The storytelling here is hobbled by the problem that befalls those adapting texts with a fervent fan base. Lawrence is obliged to be faithful to the written version, so the pacing feels rushed in some scenes and draggy in others.

The corniness of the book is also evident in the film’s juvenile moral reasoning, a problem that also plagued the original series.

Tributes who do all they can to kill lest they be killed are portrayed as villains, often in the crudest and most melodramatic ways. Competency and skill mark one out as deserving of a violent elimination, without reflection on the matter of their deaths being dished out as entertainment to cinema audiences.

And like the original series, the cartoonishly over-the-top older characters who organise the games steal the movie away from the younger ones.

As the game designer, Dr Gaul, Davis is riveting. She is a master at stagecraft, and everything the Oscar-winning actress does reinforces the idea that her character is at the height of her powers.

Game Of Thrones (2011 to 2019) star Peter Dinklage, as the ever-grave Casca Highbottom, dean of the academy Coriolanus attends, lends the story pathos without letting it fall into mawkishness.

Hot take: This book-to-movie romantic fantasy makes up for its jerky pacing with strong action and scene-stealing performances from Davis and Dinklage.