The Hunger Games (2012)

The Hunger Games Can Eat Me

No one person requested today’s movie.  It was overly talked about on Facebook until I finally felt like I was definitely going to have to see it.  When my days off gave me the opportunity to catch the movie for cheap, I finally decided that it was necessary.  The movie is based on a novel by Suzanne Collins that I have not/will never read, but it’s really popular.  The movie was so popular that I walked past the second longest line for a movie’s opening night on my way to my last theatrical disappointment, John Carter.  Since it came out, I’ve heard way too much about it, so it’s now time for you to hear a little more about it in my review of The Hunger Games, based on a novel by Suzanne Collins, written by Gary Ross and Billy Ray, directed by Gary Ross, and starring Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Donald Sutherland, Wes Bentley, Alexander Ludwig, Isabelle Fuhrman, Amandla Stenberg, Liam Hemsworth, Lenny Kravitz, Stanley Tucci, and Willow Shields.

In post-apocalyptic North America, the government has decided that it’s a super good idea to collect one boy and one girl from 11 districts to fight to the death in a battle called the Hunger Games.  For the 74^th Hunger Games, 12-year-old Primrose Everdeen (Willow Shields) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) are chosen from District 12, but Primrose’s sister Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) – herein referred to as Catness – steps in and volunteers to take part in the games instead of her sister.  They’re taken by Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) to meet their mentor, Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson) – herein referred to as Sammitch – who helps them learn how to play the game.  After some training and other nonsense, they get started into the Hunger Games.  Whoever shall survive and be the star of the next two books?  No one will ever know.

I do not understand you women-folk.  I really feel like I should try to figure out why you like the things you like, but I’ll probably just try to either ignore them or just mock them in review form.  I’ve heard this movie compared to Twilight because it’s based on a series of novels and is enjoyed almost exclusively by women, and I can say that this is a better movie than Twilight.  Of course, almost every movie is better than Twilight.  This movie is an interesting enough concept that is ruined by almost everything else.  Sure, it’s an interesting idea to have a bunch of kids try to kill each other, but it’s not when you make us follow a kid that won’t really kill anyone.  The same problems that came up in my review of Japanese Hunger Games (aka Battle Royale) came up in this movie: why is anyone unwilling to kill in this setting, and why would anyone make alliances?  You’ve been told as you enter this game that only one person is going to leave, so fucking kill yourself or throw down.  And why bother making alliances?  You’ll only have to kill them eventually anyways.  Why grow attached to someone you will have to kill eventually?  Knowing how they want us to feel about Catness, you can easily figure out how each character is going to die.  She’s meant to be our hero, so she will not be killing any friendly opponents and will probably only kill the assholes.  Catness takes it one step further by not really killing anyone.  She kills one person on accident, one person out of a reflexive action, and the last person out of mercy.  There were more than a few times in the movie where I had no fucking idea what was going on.  These things caused me to have to turn to my friend and ask him what was happening.  It seemed like there were a lot of things that would’ve been pretty obvious had I read the books, so I say fuck you to this movie for that shit.  You can’t assume that I’ve done my homework before watching your movie!  For a movie that I went into thinking it would be pretty action-heavy, I actually had walked into a movie about a girl sleeping in a tree.  All Catness really does effectively in this movie is sleep in trees, and she does it a lot and the film does not want us to miss one minute of it.  Catness is an exceptional archer, but for strategic purposes she does not pick up a bow and arrow at first.  Instead, she runs into the wilderness and sleeps in a tree.  Then she encounters enemies, so she climbs up into a tree.  Then she drops wasps on them, takes a bow from one, and climbs into a different tree.

The way they told their exceptionally boring story was also very tedious.  The director chose to film the entire thing with shaky cam, making watching the movie nearly impossible but entirely nauseating.  The final fight, for example, was shot so close and so jerky that I could barely see what was happening.  I got excited as the camera stepped back for a second that I might actually be able to see what was happening, but nope.  Right back in.  They also did a weird thing throughout the entire movie where they forgot to put sound in.  You could still figure out what was happening, but I still found it really annoying.  The settings were mostly drab and, when they weren’t, they were mostly just a bunch of trees.  The time in the Capitol had interesting settings, but they weren’t there long.  The futuristic technology that they had was pretty cool.

Okay, here’s some more things I hated that had to be prefaced with ::SPOILER ALERT::  There was a point in the movie where Catness finds out that the bad opponents are guarding a stockpile of supplies, hoping that others will come after it and get blown up by the mines they lined it with.  Catness decides to destroy this stockpile, but for some reason has someone else draw them away from it so she can shoot it with arrows and blow it up.  Guess what, Catness, you could’ve blown the thing up with them surrounding it and killed 4 of the assholes at the same time.  At one point (while Catness is sleeping in a tree … go figure), she finds Peeta has been helping the assholes to find her.  One can assume that he was trying to lead them away from her, but they never really deal with this in the movie at all.  At one point, he yells for her to run.  When they reunite later, they never have Catness say, “What the fuck were you doing, dick?”  Near the end, Catness is holding an arrow at the main bad guy, who is holding Peeta in front of him to block her shot.  She shoots him in the hand so that Peeta can push him over.  What bothers me was that Peeta had early helped establish Catness’ archery prowess by remarking on how she could shoot squirrels through the eye every single time.  But apparently she can’t hit a much larger eye under much more important circumstances.  The biggest annoyance I had in the movie (besides the shaky cam) was the resolution.  They had been told that two people from the same district could escape and Catness and Peeta survived.  They then said, “PSYCH!” and said they had to kill each other.  They decide to eat poison berries together and they give in and tell them they can both go home.  The problem with this is that they gave no weight to this dilemma and resolution, both of which were introduced and dissipated within the span of a minute.  ::END SPOILER::

Pretty much all of the performances in the movie were good, and also roughly what I’d expect from the bulk of the cast.  Jennifer Lawrence didn’t get an Oscar nomination for being hot (although that’s why I’d give her one).  She’s a good actress.  But I was curious what genetic experiment is going to come up in later books that caused her to be the only attractive person in her entire district.  She had a good bit of attitude to her.  The fact that she was never able to fully achieve badassdom was the fault of the writing, not the actress.  Neither of the love interests (Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth) did anything spectacular for me to pay them any attention, even though one of them is the brother of Thor.  Hutcherson was a little annoying to me, and usually seemed pretty dumb.  I love Elizabeth Banks, and she was good in the movie, but they made her look so weird that I only recognized her because I had seen it before watching the movie.  I also had no idea Lenny Kravitz was in the movie, but that’s all I have to say about his character.  Woody Harrelson got off to a rough start for me as Sammitch, acting the part of the clichéd guy who’s seen too much, always drunk and rude.  But you warm up to him as the movie goes along.  The only thing I have to say about Wes Bentley is that his facial hair in the movie annoyed the piss out of me.  I don’t even know how his performance was because I kept staring at it.  Also, Donald Sutherland looked like Santa Claus.

I still think you women need to raise your standards.  You’ve stepped up a pretty solid amount from Twilight, but you could still do much better.  The story was predictable, slow, and mostly Catness sleeping up a tree.  The shaky cam was annoying, but their random omission of sound was worse.  The performances were good, though.  There are worse ways to spend two and a half hours than this movie, but you might find it more entertaining to sleep in a tree for yourself.  I don’t really recommend this movie.  I promise not to hate people for liking it as I did with Twilight, but I cannot throw my vote behind others seeing it.  The Hunger Games gets “I guess we try to forget” out of “May the odds be ever in your favor.”

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Colombiana (2011)

Never Forget Where You Came From

The last of the four RedBox movies that I rented, coming at you.  When I picked these four movies up from RedBox, I expected Footloose and Jack & Jill to suck (and was mostly right), and I expected The Thing and today’s movie to be good.  The Thing kind of disappointed me, but I still have one more to go.  I was vaguely interested in today’s movie when it was in theaters.  It looked like sort of a cool action/revenge movie with a hot and talented lead that I’ve liked in the past.  It was even written by someone who’s work I’ve enjoyed in the past.  Let’s see if the collaboration works out in my review of Colombiana, written by Luc Besson and Robert Karm Kamen, directed by Olivier Megaton (is that a real last name?), and starring Zoe Saldana, Jordi Molla, Cliff Curtis, Lennie James, Michael Vartan, and Amandla Stenberg.

A group of Colombian drug mafia guys go to a guy’s house and gun down him and his wife, looking for some special item that is in his possession.  Before getting killed, the dad gave the item to his daughter, Cataleya (Amandla Stenberg).  The leader, Marco (Jordi Molla), tries to get her to tell him where it is, but instead gets stabbed in the hand by her and she escapes, making it to the US embassy.  She vomits the item onto the Ambassador’s desk and it turns out to be a flash drive with valuable information on it.  This is enough to pay for her way to America, where she promptly escapes from the Department of Social Services and makes her way to her uncle, Emilio (Cliff Curtis).  It’s from him that Cataleya learns how to be an assassin.  15 years later, she’s Zoe Saldana.  Not a bad position to be in.  She’s also a pretty damned good killer because she’s good at hand to hand, stealth, good with any weapon, and who wouldn’t let her kill them?  Almost makes me wish I had killed her parents when she was young … oh wait … that wouldn’t help me have sex with her at all!  Well, she spends the rest of the movie trying to get revenge.

This movie pretty much delivered on everything I went into it wanting.  I wanted some cool action, and they gave me that, although it was a little more talkie and could’ve used some more action for my taste.  They had some, but they seemed to focus more on the story (which was a pretty typical revenge plot) and on trying to be a little too stylish with their action.  Some stylized action is nice, but too much of it and you’ve lost focus on the “action” part.  And if you’re not giving me enough action, then you’re relying on the story.  At first, I was a little bored with the movie because they spend too much time with Cataleya as a kid, before she was an ass-kicker.  I don’t care about that!  Give me Zoe Saldana in skintight things with her nipples poking out!  That’s why I came to this movie!  Then she gets to the killing, and that gets a little more interesting.  The first one has her going from a super tight miniskirt into an ultra tight jumpsuit, and I appreciated both.  But then she basically has to make a trip through the entire police office, up to the roof, down through the vents, and ends up at what seems to be the jail cell next door to the one she was in.  The rest of the action scenes were spread out between drama with her boyfriend, drama with her uncle, and the police trying to find out who was doing her killings, which I found completely insulting.  The cops are going through the footage of who was booked at the same time as the guy that got shot in the cell but, when they come across Cataleya, the main cop literally says “We’re not looking for a woman.  It’s not possible.”  Really, dick?  How could you forget that the rest of your line was “How could she possibly kill people while dragging around all of the kids AND still finding the time to get the dishes and the laundry done?”  There’s no way a woman could point a gun and pull a trigger, asshole?  Do their tits get in the way?  Luckily, Zoe has nice little ones so that she can still put her hands together in front of her in order to aim a gun, unlike 99% of the other women in the world.  I wanted that scene to keep going with another cop saying “But sir, she was the only other person in the prison that night” and him saying “Hmmmm… I got it!  He shot himself in the chest 5 times with the gun he didn’t have!  Case closed!  Good work, gentlemen.”  The action in the movie was fairly well done (where it was done at all), but most took the form of big shootouts, which I don’t find that interesting generally.  At the end, there’s a good fist fight that I enjoyed.  It was reminiscent of a fight from one of the Bourne movies because the person with the inferior weapon (in this case, a towel) is able to beat the shit out of a person with a superior weapon (in this case, a gun).  I liked the similar scene in Bourne where he kicked someone’s ass with a towel and a book.  I did think it was weird that she stabbed the guy a few times with a toothbrush, and also stabbed him in the shoulder with the slide of his gun.  I thought the last part was especially weird because (unless the bad guy was made of pudding) I don’t think you could stab someone with a slide.  And if you did, you’d probably want to do it in the heart or something.  You can come back from a shoulder wound.

I honestly can’t remember anyone in this movie beyond the star.  Every performance besides her and possibly Cliff Curtis made no impact whatsoever.  Zoe Saldana was great, and great to look at.  I watched this with my roommate, who decided to make fun of her for being too skinny.  But when she got down into her underwear and he saw her ass, she shut his mouth but good.  Me, I kind of like skinny womens, so I was down all the way.  She goes for a lot of skintight clothing in this movie, and even her loose clothing is kind of sheer and almost see through, so my eyes were fixed on her most of the time.  Oh yeah, her performance was good too.  I was charmed by her when she was masquerading as a drunk girl in her first scene, but that scene kind of lost it’s impact because it was spoiled in every trailer I saw for the movie.  The rest of the time she was a cold hard bitch of a killing machine, except for one scene where she allowed herself to be vulnerable, and she pulled that off as well.  There was one thing about that scene that always bothered me, and that was the way she held her “f” in the word “front” as she said “He killed my parents … in ffffffffffffffffront of me.”  First off, no they didn’t.  They were in the other room when they were gunned down.  Then she held the f in a weird way that’s always stuck in my mind for some reason.  Cliff Curtis was also good in this movie, but not in a way that causes me to have something to say about it.

Colombiana turned out to be a pretty standard action/revenge movie.  The story was fairly predictable, and one you’ve seen before.  The action was good, but spread out too much by the story I wasn’t that interested in.  And the performance of Zoe Saldana was smokin’ hot.  Also good.  I really need to remember that part.  Either way, I don’t feel like I can tell you that you SHOULD see this movie, but I’m alright saying you probably won’t hate it if you do.  It’s entertaining enough, but just a little slow and not very noteworthy.  Colombiana gets “If you want to be a killer and survive, you got to be a smart one” out of “My parents were killed … in fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffront of me.”

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