What if they held a Hunger Games tournament and nobody watched? That's the question posed by Gale Hawthorne (played by Liam Hemsworth), a young man who stands a strong chance of being recruited for the annual ritual held in the futuristic republic of Panem. His friend, Katniss Everdeen (played by Jennifer Lawrence), laughs at the thought of people tuning out on the Hunger Games because if you're a citizen of Panem, you're expected to be glued to your TV.
"You root for your favorites, you cry when they get killed -- it's sick," Gale insists. Some critics have leveled the same charge against Suzanne Collins' extraordinarily successful trilogy of "Hunger Games" books, claiming that the post-apocalyptic stories in which young adults must literally fight for their lives are too grim and too savage for teen readers. But if you look at what's on reality television these days, Collins' best sellers barely qualify as science-fiction. Night after night, you can see desperate characters risking humiliation and sometimes even serious injuries to stay in front of those all-powerful cameras for one more episode and bathe in the limelight just a little while longer. Perhaps we're all a bit closer to Panem than we'd like to think.
In "The Hunger Games," Gale manages to avoid being selected in the dreaded Reaping, the random name-drawing that decides which 24 unlucky kids will be sent to the flashy-trashy Capitol to try their luck in the arena as Tributes. Katniss is also spared, but she ends up in the Games anyhow when she volunteers to take the place of her terrified younger sister Primrose. Having spent much of her life stalking prey in the woods with a bow and arrow, Katniss hopes the survival skills she's picked up will be her salvation in the Hunger Games.
Fans of the books, and there are millions of them, will be pleased to learn that Lawrence is a marvelous choice for Katniss, a huntress who becomes the hunted once the Games kick into high gear and she becomes the target of a team of bloodthirsty bad guys, led by the sneering Cato, played by Alexander Ludwig. Lawrence, who earned a best actress Oscar nomination last year for her electrifying work in "Winter's Bone," brings a fragile sort of ferocity to Katniss. She's tough and wonderfully resourceful, but in her doll-like face and astonishingly expressive eyes you can see she's always barely a heartbeat away from sheer terror.
The movie, directed by Gary Ross of "Seabiscuit" and "Pleasantville" fame, does a thoroughly respectable job of condensing the plot and distilling the themes of Collins' novel into a thought-provoking, sometimes hair-raising drama. Although much of the brutality occurs off-screen or in blurry quick cuts, Ross doesn't let us forget that Katniss, Peeta and their fellow Tributes are engaged in a battle to the death. And if they can't slay each other quickly enough to satisfy the viewers, then puppet master Seneca Crane (played by Wes Bentley) and his team of engineers will happily terminate them with their arsenal of high-tech horrors.
There's an admirable attention to detail throughout the movie that makes it much more substantial than your standard action thriller. While some readers will nit-pick certain alterations or omissions, the screenplay by Ross, Collins and Billy Ray devotes an impressive amount of time to establishing the characters of Katniss and Peeta, as well as their booze-soaked would-be mentor Haymitch, nicely played by Woody Harrelson, and Katniss' sympathetic stylist Cinna, played with quiet charm and charisma by Lenny Kravitz. Donald Sutherland only needs a few scenes to establish the all-powerful President Snow as a sort of sadistic Santa Claus, complete with frosted beard and icy vocal inflections. Stanley Tucci as the master of ceremonies with a plastic smile and teal-tinted hair and Elizabeth Banks as the abrasively chipper cheerleader Effie Trinket add a few refreshing comic twists along the way.
Much of "The Hunger Games" is dark and disturbing, but don't be surprised if you find yourself caught up in the action and unable to turn away, just like the poor people of Panem.