theblackscythe

Although I am not a particularly huge fan of this franchise, I have enjoyed the movies up to this point. The first was highly flawed but mostly enjoyable, and the second a large improvement, actually among the better blockbusters of that year. This third entry takes the franchise into a dull, predictable and hugely underwhelming direction however.

The first thing to note here is the acting. It is generally subpar. Lawrence gives the least interesting performance of her career, clearly either tired with the franchise or not engaged by the weak script. The supporting cast is generally filled with talented actors, Harrelson, Hoffman, Moore, Sutherland and Dormer. However they are almost all wasted, given little to do and often spend time filling the screen with no real purpose. The is most glaringly obvious with Harrelson, who spends the majority of the film wandering around in the background with zero purpose. All of these great actors are shelved in favour of the dull mediocrity that is Liam Hemsworth, who is given a huge amount of screen time here. His presence is comparable with a small moist stone in your sock, irritating and uncomfortable without arousing much of a direct reaction from the victim. The only good performance of note is Natalie Dormer, who is given a passable amount of screen time and appears to be the only actor enjoying themselves.

The cinematography, CGI, lighting and set design are all dull and forgettable, not worthy of description or discussion. As is the predictable and horrendously repetitive script, which features around four separate scenes wherein Lawrence's character cries whilst surrounded by rubble and debris.

Finally, I will look at the film from the perspective of somebody who has in fact read the trilogy. Mockingjay is a bad book. It has some of the most rushed pacing I have ever seen, and has no character of emotional depth to it. However this film is bad in a totally different, if equally offensive way. It is bland, personality free and lazy to witness. The action is tacked on and boring, the characters are as dull as in the book, and the pacing non-existent. This is a massive disappointment, and a sad collapse of an otherwise decent film series. I would say I have hopes for Part 2, however the second half of the book is a hilarious disaster already, so I am very sceptical.

I was quite underwhelmed by this film. There are many who consider this to be among the greatest films to be created by director Clint Eastwood, on the level of 'Unforgiven' or 'Gran Torino'. I sadly did not see a great film here, I mostly saw a decent but ultimately flawed and uninspired character drama.

Firstly, the films biggest asset is it's cast of actors. Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Kevin Bacon and Lawrence Fishburne all give great performances and it is quite interesting to see their varied acting styles interact. Tim Robbins probably gives the most impressive performance here, totally worthy of an Academy Award. However, the acting is dragged down by an uninspired and formulaic script. Many of the lines are tedious and cliché', and others are almost nonsensical and stupid. This does not apply for every exchange, however it is prominent enough to be an annoyance.

The plot is fairly standard fare. There are no shocking twists or particularly daring ways of presenting the story here. It is far from incompetent or laughable, however it almost becomes boring in it's predictability. The film's strongest narrative feature is it's solid pacing, allowing the actors room to showcase their acting talent, in fact much of the film appears centred around creating the perfect conditions for these actors to demonstrate their talents. The film's pacing is sadly ruined towards the end, when the film's plot is wrapped up and an overlong epilogue sequence does it's best to ruin as much of the good which came before as possible. Not only in terms of pacing, but also in terms of character and the film's thematic content, This ending was quite terrible and did much to destroy the film for me, specifically the moronic 'King' monologue.

The cinematography and set design is very nice, nothing outstanding but defiantly strong. It has a very well defined look and can get downright gorgeous at times, specifically in it's impressively shot opening sequence. However this good visual work is often undermined by a poorly used and highly repetitive soundtrack. Often wildly out of place with the actions on screen, and sounding quite cheap and melodramatic in places.

Overall, although the performances are good, I was quite underwhelmed by this picture. I could not look past it's gaping flaws and did not find it much above decent.

So bad it's good (SBiG) is a term commonly used to describe films which are entertaining despite being terrible, mainly through unintentional hilarity. I have enjoyed many films for being SBiG, for example "The Room" and "Plan 9 From Outer Space". However I would argue that Foodfight! is not even worthy of that dubious honour, and here's why; It is far too dull. The film reaches an almost mind-bending degree of total failure, to the point where it becomes hard to rationalise and understand, never mind mock.

Foodfight!'s animation is probably it's most glaring flaw. It looks horrifying, absolutely unacceptable by the standards that were in place by 2012. Perhaps it would have been more tolerable in the early 2000's, provided the broken facial expressions and hideous textures were improved, however it is insulting to expect a paying audience in 2012 to tolerate this crap. There is little to talk about here, aside from how obviously ugly this film is.

The writing is honestly a greater insult to me than the animation. Almost every conversation or exchange of dialogue contains puns, bad puns. Puns constitute 80% or so of the film's limp and flaccid attempts at humour. These puns vary from bad, to eye-bulging in their failure, it is a pathetic defeat to see 5 PROFESSIONAL WRITERS produce this horrendous quality of humour. Aside the puns, the film's dialogue is disjointed and completely nonsensical, it becomes unintelligible noise after around 20 minutes or so. There are also some worryingly misogynistic and sexual elements at play in this 'script', for a film supposedly meant for young children. If I were to discover that this film was written in one sitting and was partially intended as a joke, I would totally believe it.

The audio quality also causes me to tilt my head in sheer bewilderment. Some lines, sometimes from the same character, are of drastically lower quality than others in terms of audio clarity. This problem gets worse towards the film's end, leading me to assume that the more expensive microphones were lost or sold later in the film's production, meaning cheaper mics had to used. The quality honestly reaches shocking levels of awfulness, and becomes near to unlistenable at points.

Overall, this film fails in every notable area. It is hideous in every strata of it's existence, to a point in which it stops being funny and simply becomes sad to witness. This is the audio/visionary equivalent of having a sowing needle impaled through your toe, if that makes any sense.