The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire opens with a moment of reflection.  Earthy huntress Katniss Everdeen (again played with a wily grace by Jennifer Lawrence), the lethally clever co-victor of the teenage bloodbath of the last chapter, is seemingly lost, fragile and scarred.  Staring into a meadow with the demons of her past in a state of unease and terror.  The moment doesn't stick very long, but Lawrence, who has become a major movie star and won an Oscar in between the first two cycles of her massively successful YA franchise, manages to shade the smallest morsels of subtext and longing throughout the assembly line busy work of the sequel (there are basics that need to be covered and quickly), igniting the film with a conscience it doesn't necessarily earn nor deserve.  That the second installment of Suzanne Collins' bestselling trilogy rests solely on her mighty shoulders would be an understatement; Lawrence infuses a soul amidst the corporate branding and provides a reason to care.

Not that the film around her isn't arresting in it of itself.  Francis Lawrence (Water For Elephants, I Am Legend) inherits the reins to the franchise from first chapter director Gary Ross and the second film is overall more polished, brisk and shapely, even as it runs its charted course that's largely the same of the first film.  Clearly the budget has raised-- the special effects are a bit flashier, the make-up and hairstyling effects a bit more garish and the overall design of the picture is a bit more fluid and more fittingly epic in stature as for sure, the stakes have been raised.  Even within its by-design packaging, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire ups the ante in an entertaining, if hardly surprising way-- the screenplay by Simon Beaufoy and Michael Arndt manages to be looser, funnier and meatier all at once, breathing glimmers of life, if not exactly insight, from the more stridently structured first outing.  Yet, and this isn't exactly a denouncement of the film as a whole, but a matter of fact-- Catching Fire is but a mere stepping stone to the next installment, the forthcoming two-part (oh brother) finale.  As such the generously plotted two-and-one-half-hour film can only be as good as its "to be continued" conclusion.