The series’ heroine, a steely and determined teenager named Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) from hardscrabble District 12, survives the Games along with Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), who has an unrequited crush on her, and at the beginning of Catching Fire, they are being sent on a countrywide promotional tour that is based largely on the concocted illusion of romance between them. The tour doesn’t last long, as Katniss and Peeta’s hearts are clearly not in the silly scripted events in which they are forced to take part, and the state’s glowering President Snow (Donald Sutherland) begins to realize that Katniss’s popularity and the brash manner in which she and Peeta undermined the rules of the Hunger Games (and therefore the authority of the state) by threatening to eat poison berries together and thus leave no victor alive, has possibly planted the seeds of a new revolution that could topple his despotic regime.

The initial idea is to force Katness and Peeta to play along with a scripted narrative that reconfigures their act of defiance as an act of teenage love, but that ruse is too thin to support its oppressive intensions (apparently, the media aren’t infinitely influential and subject to invisible manipulation, as some might have us believe). Along with a new games master named Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman), Snow instead conspires to eliminate Katniss (a despot’s de facto solution to all problems) by forcing her to compete in a new Hunger Games, except this time with different stakes. It just so happens that the following year is the 75th anniversary of the revolution, which allows him to decree the “Quarter Quell,” a special edition of the Hunger Games in which two survivors of a previous Game from each quarter are selected as tributes. The only male survivors from District 12 are Peeta and Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson), the cynical and usually drunken mentor who trained Katniss and Peeta in the previous film. Katniss, however, is the only female survivor, so it is a foregone conclusion that she will be selected to fight again.

Thus, director Francis Lawrence (I Am Legend), who takes over the reigns from previous director Gary Ross, gets to take us through the same set of events we saw in the first film, but with various twists. We get another “reaping,” in which the tributes are selected in a grand, but depressing ceremony, their transportation to the glistening high rises and glass towers of the Capitol where they engage in physical combat training and are given elaborate makeovers so they can be trotted through the media like celebrities, and finally their arrival at the Games, where they are put into glass tubes and elevated up to a highly controlled environment and set loose against each other. Familiar faces are everywhere, from Elizabeth Banks’s trilling public relations agent Effie Trinket (who gets to be more of a character this time, rather than a one-dimensional representation of everything that is wrong with the media circus around the Games), to Stanley Tucci’s Caesar Flickerman, the grinning, flamboyant host of the pre-Games ceremonies who is just as shallow and artificial as ever. The elaborate costuming of the Capitol residents, which merges Victorian excess with ’80s New Wave awfulness, is even more pronounced this time around, as is Katniss’s symbolic couture, which is designed by Lenny Kravitz’s sympathetic designer Cinna. There are a number of new faces, particularly the Games contestants, many of whom will die very early, but others of which we know will play crucial roles, including Jeffrey Wright’s eccentric intellectual Beetee, Sam Claflin’s sensitive hunk Finnick Odair, and Jena Malone’s embittered Johanna Mason, who does what all of us wish we would do if stuck in her situation, which is break rank and scream obscenities at the fatuous Capitol crowds during her enforced press conference.

About halfway through Catching Fire, entertaining though it is, you start to get the sinking feeling that it may turn out to be the worst kind of sequel in which there isn’t really anything new to offer except obvious variations and elaborations on what worked before (even the film’s theatrical one-sheet was little more than a more elaborate and dramatic rendition of the first film’s). Almost everything in the first hour is familiar, from the opening that finds Katniss hunting alone in the woods outside District 12 before meeting up with Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth), her childhood friend and would-be romantic interest, to the parade of excess surrounding the Games. The behind-the-scenes intrigue involving President Snow and Plutarch offers a new wrinkle, giving Catching Fire a deeper political and social resonance as we see just how manufactured and manipulated this particular media event is (images of white-clad storm troopers marching with guns in hand and fascistic military types lashing and executing dissenters doesn’t hurt, either).

The excessive nature of the Games and the pageantry surrounding them is perhaps their undoing, as their artificiality is so transparent that the repressed masses can’t help but see right through them to the dark heart of President Snow’s regime. Thus, revolution is in the air, seething in the background, which is what eventually gives Catching Fire its own identity. The Games themselves differ slightly from what we saw in the first film, as the contestants are trapped in a controlled jungle that circles around a large lake. While the contestants themselves tended to be the biggest danger in The Hunger Games, this time around there are environmental threats that arrive at inopportune times, including a poisonous fog, a large troop of snarling baboons, and a massive wave that crashes through the jungle, washing out everything in its wake. The environmental dangers allow director Lawrence to flex the film’s special effects muscles with more vigor, although it is to somewhat diminished effect. What made the first film sting was the interpersonal horrors of pitting adolescents against each other to the death, and Catching Fire, with its mostly adult contestants and constant focus on the environment itself, loses some of that unnerving impact.

However, just when you think the film has nothing new to offer, the final few minutes reveal a significant twist that leaves us on a startling cliffhanger while also setting up the stakes of the third entry (which, following in the financially prosperous wake of the final installments of the Harry Potter and Twilight franchises, was divided into two movies to maximize profits). Granted, much of the film is still arguably a rehash of what we’ve seen before, but at the end we are at least forced to rethink what has happened and recognize that much of what we saw was just a surface hiding a series of machination and manipulations going on underneath. The film also benefits, as the first one did, from the impressive acting chops of Oscar-anointed Jennifer Lawrence, whose intensity and sense of self makes Katniss into a prototypical action heroine, one who embodies an ideal set of values and physical abilities but still stays psychologically and emotionally grounded. She responds to adversity and emotional torment in ways that are both admirable and realistic (on several occasions she breaks down into raw hysterics, but she never feels hysterical). She is strong without being invulnerable, and her character’s arc carries with it a real sense of nobility and sacrifice that makes even the film’s most familiar elements engaging.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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