Set in a future where the Capitol selects a boy and girl from the twelve districts to fight to the death on live television, Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her younger sister's place for the latest match.
The Hunger Games is an essential science fiction film for our times; perhaps the essential science fiction film of our times. Whatever your age, it demands to be devoured.
As thrilling and smart as it is terrifying. There have been a number of big-gun literary series brought to screen over the past decade. This slays them all.
The Hunger Games is that rarest of beasts: a Hollywood action blockbuster that is smart, taut and knotty.
A faithful adap, a grown-up teen movie and flaming good entertainment. The big test for the franchise lies ahead with the uneven second and third books. But on this showing, the odds are in its favour.
Fatally emasculated by the need to appease young fans. The premise alone carries it so far, but cinematically speaking, it’s a non-event.
Deft direction and the superior cast mean that The Hunger Games largely transcends its teen-fiction origins to prove itself more than a money spinner. The odds are certainly in its favour.
Sharp, engrossing, thrill-a-minute.
The whole thing is like TV’s Big Brother projected into the future by a demented Classics student: so terrible it might, with antiquity, become a camp masterpiece.
As a comment on the public’s appetite for reality TV the story has nothing significant to say while there are precious few insights into human behaviour thanks to the underwritten characters, especially Katniss’ fellow contestants. Lord Of The Flies it ‘aint.
The Hunger Games is a very enjoyable futurist adventure, presented with a compelling, beady-eyed intensity.
As it meanders towards its inevitable sequel set-up, The Hunger Games leaves you wanting more – just not in the way that it should.
The Hunger Games is playing variations on the Twilight formula of a lovers' triangle-with-violence, plus a lot of daft art design. And the irony of its finger-wagging remains.
Surprisingly good, gory fun.
First blockbuster of 2012.
It's far too long and much inferior to the ferocious Japanese Battle Royale. Younger audiences may well be intrigued, but I'd be surprised if it proves as popular as the Twilight series, which is more openly necrophilic in a romantic "swoon to death" way.
It's The Running Man for Justin Bieber fans.
The film just leaves non-readers wondering why a fleeting character is given her own anthem. The film’s 12A certificate also means the kills are quick, disorientating and allusive, so the end result is, in every sense, bloodless.
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General release. Check local listings for show times.
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