Young adult or not, I really enjoyed The Hunger Games franchise. I actually read the books before watching the movies, and it is one of those odd franchises where I didn’t hate all the changes. yes, I could get really nit picky especially around characters totally left out of the books, but some of the aspects that were changed made sense. If you’ve only seen the films, for example, when it is just down to the final three in the first book, the game unleashes these human/wolf hybrids using the reanimated corpses of the fallen child tributes. I’d imagine that makes for a tough PG-13. So, I didn’t mind that change. I was much more affronted by Insurgent, which really showed that no one adapting the Divergent series read the books.

So, I did try to read The Ballad Of Songbirds and Snakes, and even with the book, I couldn’t get through it. There’s this constant problem with watching the future President Snow growing up and utilizing him as a central protagonist. Sure, Coriolanus isn’t the nicest of nice guys, but he is your protagonist, and there are many moments we are expected to sympathize with him. I love a good anti-hero myself, and almost always you have to see the bad guy see that he’s made his mistakes, and then make the changes. If you look at some legendary baddies, like the MCU’s Loki, The Walking Dead’s Negan, or any of the myriad of cop/criminal comedies where the officer has to at some point rely on the criminal for something, these characters all change. Here, Suzanne Collin’s thinks that by hitting the restart button, that we can learn the origin of evil, but instead of making the protagonist Lucy Graybeard, the de facto Katniss of the story, we’re stuck with Snow.

And the film has to adapt that. It is a challenge, and not a good one. I made it about halfway through the book, and even I noticed some changes. Some of them worked, some did not. The choice of actors here really helps save the film. Rachel Ziegler as Lucy is splendid. She’s a songbird herself, and her voice is constantly on display, a capella and all, and she would have stolen the whole thing if Viola Davis wasn’t having the time of her life. I’m sure there was a moment where Viola Davis was happy to do a film where no one expected an Oscar performance from her, so she could ham it up like she was auditioning to play a comic book villain much wilder than Amanda Waller.

But the story can’t help but struggle. Snow has a bunch of classmates who are largely treated as disposable, and we really never get to know most of the tributes. Some die before the Games even start. This film is painfully long, and focuses so much on a character no one wanted a movie about, with an actor who is just fine. not great, just fine. I would almost entirely delete the third act. It goes on forever, it is largely dull and pointless, and it drags the life out of the film. The first and second acts are fine, and if they had just wrapped up quicker, this would have been maybe a serviceable attempt at rebooting. but, instead, the best thing I can really say is that Rachel Ziegler and Viola Davis are worth watching.

The audio description here is very well done, from the team at Deluxe, with tanzi Alexander narrating. There are a lot of characters to focus on here, in a dystopian world that is not ours. This is also an older version of the Panem we know, and if I had any nitpicks about the description, it would simply lie in more world building. This cannot look like the same Capitol from the original four films, nor should it. Nor would the really basic Hunger Games. Giving fans of the franchise a better understanding of the contrast would be maybe the one thing. But I think the description works pretty well, especially if you have never seen a film i this series. And, while it helps to be familiar with the series, there’s very little that connects this to the Katniss Everdeen saga.

Barely, I’ll give this a slight nod on the positive. And the producers of this film can thank whoever cast Ziegler and Davis for that.

Final Grade: C+