First published on September 14, 2008, over 100 million copies of The Hunger Games novels have been sold worldwide, and the subsequent film adaptations of the original three books have made $3 billion. As of the writing of this review, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes doesn’t look likely to make much of an impact on the franchise’s bottom line.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

Ten years have passed since the end of The Great War. As Panem continues to rebuild, The Hunger Games has begun to wane in popularity, leading to bolder rebel action against The Capitol and its government. So, in an effort to both improve ratings and remind the Districts of their place in the New Order, students of The Academy have been enlisted to freshen things up.

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An origin story for the original trilogy’s main villain, President Snow, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a masterclass in bad directorial and writing instincts mixed with a healthy dose of lack-of-focus. Ballad has no true identity. Instead, it zips around like a hummingbird, only taking short sips at character development and story arcs before flittering off to something new.

Snow, played by Tom Blyth, is a young man from a renowned Capitol family in decline and near destitution. Growing up in the shadow of his hero father’s memory, Snow has worked hard to be the best of the best at The Academy in the hopes of winning The Plinth Prize (an endowment of extreme wealth). Unfortunately for Snow, this year, the prize will no longer be awarded to the best student but to the best mentor with the most marketable tribute.

Blyth does a fine job with Snow, especially when one considers the quality of what he had to work with. The film is replete with clunky and repetitive dialogue. Mentions of “The Plinth Prize” rival Barbie’s patriarchy for this year’s most repeated and awkwardly inserted line in a film, while the first runner-up is “Lucy Gray,” the name of Rachel Zegler‘s character. Even so, Blyth maintains his emotional presence throughout each second-rate moment and even manages to cultivate audience interest in the character despite the handicap.

However, the film’s greatest weakness isn’t the mind-tattooing repetition of the name Lucy Gray but the character and her love story subplot. Rachel Zegler plays the role to the best of her ability but the character is too poorly written and utilized for even the best performer to do themselves justice. The result is a homespun Southern caricature, the ridiculousness of which is only amplified by Zegler’s cartoonish Southern Accent and never-ending shlocky and obvious folk song refrains. Fans of the sitcom Community will be unable to avoid being reminded of Annie pretending to be from Texas.

In a clear lack of focus by both the director and writers, Zegler’s Lucy flips from the tough-as-nails spitfire around whom the film’s action and lead’s motivation centers to a tertiary character whose existence is still important but whose presence isn’t. In fact, the entire character could have (read: should have) been completely cut out of the film, leaving Snow to empathize with the entire group of tributes as an idea instead of a love interest.

That said, Lucy isn’t the only character who suffers under the inept ministrations of the film’s writers and director. The tributes are utterly generic and forgettable, never giving the audience a reason to care about them or whether they live or die. Furthermore, the two most interesting characters in the film, Peter Dinklage’s Dean Highbottom, and Viola Davis’s Dr. Gaul, are criminally underused. Dinklage is in his element as an intelligent and troubled intellectual with a substance abuse problem, while Viola Davis is unrecognizable, deliciously defining melodrama as she chews up scenery and plays to the rafters in every underdeveloped scene.

However, the film’s mixed bag of underdeveloped and/or useless characters isn’t its only shortcoming. With the exception of the sets, attention to detail is also greatly wanting. Davis plays the eccentric and sadistic Game Designer, seemingly one of the most vaunted roles in all of Panem. This being early in the Games, she’s in no danger of losing her position like Seneca Crane. Yet, while there is much and more talk about the importance of the “design” of each game, at this time in Panem’s history, there doesn’t appear to be any design at all.

In their current state, the games are incredibly unsophisticated. This film notwithstanding, tributes are shuffled off to a small stone arena, one-third the size of an NFL stadium, with a cache of weapons placed in the center, and they battle royale within its single-tiered and open confines without so much as a pillar to duck behind. It’s far more Roman gladiators than Survivor-with-swords. Furthermore, with the exception of this movie’s games, matches ostensibly regularly last only minutes, as is evidenced by Caesar Flickerman’s (another underutilized character) need to cancel his dinner reservations on the evening of the game’s first night. All of this begs the question, exactly what is it that the game designer designs?

The answer in this film is artificial and ineffective attempts at building tension. Seemingly having no duties other than to be odd and design deadly beasts for, what is this film’s first third act (yeah, it has two 1st, 2nd, and 3rd acts), Gaul whips up a batch of something special for this year’s tributes.

***SPOILER*** The problem is that it makes no sense. It’s an unstoppable flood of death designed to fill the stadium and kill everyone in it. Firstly, it was assumed that there would be a live audience in attendance, and the barrier between them and this would have been insufficient to stop it. Secondly, when designing this, Dr. Gaul couldn’t have anticipated the situation that led to this year’s winner defeating it, and by rights, it should have killed Lucy Gray along with all of the other tributes, but there was no reason given for Gaul to want to do so, making it completely random and dumb. Finally, tension was never built, and, therefore, the victory had no emotional payoff because the outcome is so clumsily telegraphed in an earlier scene. ***SPOILER***

There are dozens of little missteps and oversights that would do little to detract from the film individually but, when taken as a whole, show a lack of fit and finish that separates good films from great films. Unfortunately, thanks to much more fundamental issues, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes doesn’t come close to being a great film, even without these little missteps.

The result is that fans of the book may enjoy seeing their favorite characters and set pieces brought to life, but for the casual viewer, there’s very little reason to spend time or money on The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Even though this film has a couple of woke elements, they aren’t infused into the film’s marrow but are minor and surface-level.

The original Hunger Games films are far more woke than this, with people fawning over the charisma black hole Mary-Sue that was Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss and the useless beta Peeta constantly needing rescue.

Furthermore, this film’s aesthetic strongly favors painting the evil Capitol in a communist chic.

Representation

• This film has all of the DEI hires. Apparently, in the future, regions will have nothing to do with ethnic diversity (I grew up in coal mining country. There were six black people in my high school). Instead, every district and group is comprised of Whole Foods commercial actors.
  • That said, there are no real girl-bosses, nor is every white guy evil and every woman good.
• There’s a slightly overweight female tribute with a butch haircut who everyone listens to for some reason. She exhibits no charisma or athletic ability; instead, she lumbers and screeches around with all the command authority of an angry butch lesbian at a pro-choice protest.

Subliminal Trans Agenda

• In the book, the students of The Academy wear distinctive uniforms. The uniforms are described as gray suits with black piping and black boots. The uniforms are practical and lack the opulence and extravagance associated with the Capitol’s fashion. However, men and women wear skirts over pants in the film. It’s subtle, largely thanks to the cinematographer almost never fully framing the male characters wearing these ridiculous getups, but it’s there.

Overt Trans Agenda

• The character of Tigris is played by a mentally ill man who delusionally believes himself to be a woman.