Last year The Hunger Games introduced us to a world with a, frankly, fucked-up status quo.  A post-apocalyptic society where a geographical caste system is pushed to it’s extreme, where poverty is rife at one end and opulence is indulged at the other (Occupy eat your heart out) and, each year, 24 children are snatched from their families to fight to the death live on TV.  All this to remind everyone that rebellion is bad and they should be grateful for what they’ve got.

In the previous instalment Katniss Everdeen (Lawrence), a confusingly healthy looking girl from the poorest district in the nation of Panem, volunteers to protect her sister after she is picked for the 74th Hunger Games.  What unfolded was a film made mostly of exposition, exploring the concept of a dystopian society where the desensitisation to violence and obsession with reality television is taken to it’s natural nadir.  Within this landscape, we followed Katniss’s story of struggling with this society, fighting for her life and deciding if she really does love her teammate Peeta (Hutcherson) or was just playing him to win.  The film culminated with Peeta and Katniss winning the games and sticking two fingers to the Man in the process.

Catching Fire picks up after the 74th Games with our winners on a tour across the districts where citizens are forced to spectate or watch the presentations in a ratings goldmine that Simon Cowell could only dream of.  Katniss, Peeta, Haymitch (Harrelson) and Effie (Banks) reunite to perform this pantomime of political pandering, but something is amiss.  After her actions in the Games, Katniss has become an unwitting icon for freedom for the people and the tour serves not to reinforce the fear of the government, but to ignite the spark rebellion against them.

The film opens to a slow start, setting the scene once more for our characters and the backstory of what is supposed to happen post-games, but ramps up quickly once the tour starts.  Scenes of protest that were hinted at in the first film are explored in darker detail here, and the violent arm of the establishment is seen striking at its subjugated people with tact and deft direction from Francis Lawrence – the only punches this film pulls is to keep it’s rating a 12A.  As the story develops we play witness to a game of chess where as a piece is taken, often so are lives in President Snow’s  (Sutherland) quest to destroy the image of our heroine and extinguish her flame.

The film’s challenge is it’s source material, the popular novel where it revisits an identical framework as the original.  The opening act simply sets up another year of the Hunger Games, and many scenes in the film are almost replicated frame-by-frame.  But don’t despair, pay close attention and dig a little deeper and you’ll be rewarded by stronger performances from the cast, deeper development of the characters and action that far outclass the former movie.  And remember, this film is the bridge in the trilogy (think Empire without the droids) and does a fantastic job of moving the pieces into place for a fantastic culmination.  You’ll not want to miss a beat of this movie, and the finale will leave your head spinning, baying for more.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is in cinemas on the 21st November 2013.

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