In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

This is a watered down copy of Battle Royale which was unique and entertaining as hell! Honestly, I had to watch this silliness due to a sleepover and, I just wanted to turn it off and let the kids watch the far superior Kinji Fukasaku movie instead. However, the kids were only 9 which is about the age cap on this piece of ripped off crap.

Cinematography - TerriblePlot - Semi-interesting Characters - FlatThere really isn't anything to say about this movie. Its boring and predictable. If you liked the book, then watch it I guess. This movie is somewhat entertaining, but I'm bored just remembering watching it to write this review.

I just watched it to get to know this pop-culture piece. Overblown, terrible performances, worse script, ... what's to like?? I could have perhaps enjoyed the thing more if there were really more hunger games, but +1 hour was dedicated to bs sentimentalism and other blah. And well then, watching kids killing each other is also not my thing. WTF and why is this movie so beloved????

The Hunger Games has become a household name in pop-cultural life, and this film is an entertaining introduction to a broadly-appealing yet well done dystopia not too far off the brutality of Battle Royale or The Running Man. It's not Twilight (thank Christ for that) and thankfully it's got a better romantic triangle than any of that vampire hogwash had going for it.This series is like a millennial-appealing take on other sci-fi dystopias ranging from George Orwell's 1984 to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World; where those stories explored totalitarianism in more subversive ways this one shows how extreme things can get when violence is thrown into the equation.Considering this came out in 2012 and people are STILL saying whether or not this ripped off Battle Royale I think that those addresses are fair, and that it doesn't suffer from the pre-established derivativeness of something like Divergent (which apparently carbon-copied the story so much the films themselves were distributed by Lionsgate/Summit Entertainment).Anyway, this film is an adaptation of a book that was craving a movie based on it, and it's a good action flick focusing on young men and women trying to survive the worst to-the-death scenario you could possibly imagine.