A Thorough Lambasting of "The Hunger Games"

I was crazy excited about this movie and when my wife agreed to the matinee, I thought today was my lucky day.

Well I was wrong.

Imagine going to a five star restaurant and getting a decent TV dinner. That's pretty much "The Hunger Games." Two hours and twenty two minutes of mediocrity.

The shaky-cam, something that normally doesn't phase me in the slightest, was pretty amped up for the first twenty minutes. Thankfully it didn't span the entire move.

The fight choreography was truly the bottom of the barrel, all shaky closeups, pans and cuts. How does a blockbuster screw up fight scenes in 2012?

The love-interest chemistry was so bad I couldn't quite tell if it was supposed to be there in the first place.

The villains were thin. The sardonic stablemaster was thin. The sympathetic figures were thin. The tragic figures were thin.

The elephant in the room, the implications for the human condition in having such a contest, isn't even winked at much less developed.

And with 142 minutes to work with, you'd think the ending would be something other than forced, rushed, boilerplate and almost laughable. If I had a nickel for every movie with this ending I'd ...well, I'd have a well-deserved refund.

In retrospect, the best part of the entire movie was realizing Donald Sutherlund was in it.

Even calling it mediocre is a bit of a compliment. There is literally nothing redeeming about this movie.

How they managed to get 80% of IMDB'ers to drink the coolaid is beyond me.