By MICK LaSALLE
By MICK LaSALLE
San Francisco Chronicle
“Hunger Games: Catching Fire” doesn’t settle for halfhearted gestures. Its dystopian society isn’t somewhat horrible but truly horrible in the way of real-life totalitarian states — soul-killing, unreasoning and thuggish. The people who carry out the government’s dirty work are perpetually angry, because psychopaths rise to the top in such an environment and because anger must be nurtured so as to ward off guilt. And we’re not merely told that the president is evil; we see him operate, and he’s a smiling, genial monster.
In the lead role, Jennifer Lawrence does not act like someone in an action movie but like someone in a life-and-death drama that happens to have lots of running and jumping. Director Francis Lawrence makes sure that not a single performance is tossed off. Every effort is made to portray this awful future world as something real and to have the actors react with the right sense of terror and entrapment.
These are all solid virtues, and they take the movie far. But “Hunger Games: Catching Fire” is based on the middle book in a trilogy, and that means that it doesn’t really end. Instead it stops just as it’s getting interesting. Also, it relies too much on the success of the original story, with a plotline that calls to mind its contours. There are empty action sequences that contain no suspense at all: When Jennifer Lawrence is attacked by a pack of orangutans, does anyone worry that the orangutans might win?
Still, “Catching Fire” always revives, and it’s only in two or three places that the movie dishes out action for the sake of action. It runs 146 minutes and would have been better at 130, but 110 would have been too brief.
The movie takes place not long after the end of “The Hunger Games.” Katniss (Lawrence) and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) have returned to their blighted home district. Having survived the Hunger Games, they are the darlings of their country, Panem, and a potential rallying point for revolution. This places them in a dramatically compelling situation: Either they become stooges for the evil regime, the Capitol, or the Capitol will have them killed. Katniss knows this because the president (Donald Sutherland) tells her in so many words.
In the world of Panem, we are left in no doubt of the government’s willingness to kill entire districts full of people. These leaders are evil — and not in the grand way of Darth Vader, but in the small, scared way of despotic politicians. In the face of this, Katniss spends much of the first part of “Catching Fire” in a state of barely suppressed panic. That she sees no way out feels real, and it makes it easy to connect with her plight: She’s not trying to do anything, besides keep herself and her family alive.
An early scene captures the double tyranny of technology and propaganda. At one point Katniss and Peeta stand together in their desolate, poverty-ridden neighborhood. But through some holographic magic, their images are projected onto a glitzy soundstage, where a grotesque game-show host — played by Stanley Tucci in an homage to Joel Grey — interviews them. Such is the difference between reality and illusion.
In a way, Tucci, with his white teeth and wig and his party-time-in-hell manner, is the scariest figure in “Catching Fire,” not unlike the Indonesian talk show hosts in the documentary “The Act of Killing,” who are shown merrily praising death-squad murderers. The depiction of a craven television media’s employing all its flashy insincerity in the service of power comes so close to modern-day reality that it’s chilling.
It’s hard to see why the Capitol is so scared of Katniss. She’s frightened enough to be ripe for corruption. All they have to do is move her and her family to a nice place and leave them alone, and she’d never be heard from again. But no, that would be too easy. And that would be half a movie.
Philip Seymour Hoffman is a strong new addition as Plutarch Heavensbee, the new master of the games and the president’s closest collaborator. Like Sutherland, Lawrence and the rest of the actors, he isn’t slumming. He brings a magnetic and elusive calm to the role.
“The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” is best in its first hour, when it concentrates on the politics and the specific horrors of Panem. It becomes more conventional in the second half and loses steam, but it’s always heading somewhere. One might say that the next installment should be even better, but as has become typical these days, the third book in the Suzanne Collins trilogy is being made into two movies, not one. So they’re going to milk this until it’s dry.