The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes

The action scenes remain well-shot and tightly edited, and even without the provocative political energy of the Katniss years, the cultural parallels between Panem’s world and ours retain their unsettling power.

"The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes" is a film of contrasts — visually stunning yet narratively uneven, it offers a fascinating glimpse into the origins of Panem, but not without stumbling over its own ambitious intentions.

I do not buy it philosophically for one second.

A standout leading lady isn't quite enough to rescue Songbirds and Snakes from sluggish runtime, bizarre pacing, and muddled thematic elements, but Zegler's fire (combined with some memorable costuming and action set pieces) lends this film some spark.

It’s really just a tired rehash, albeit an extravagant one, this time with less appealing characters. As dystopias go, it’s a real bummer.

The story here is strong enough to stand on its own, but of course, it is a prequel, and there is a grimy pleasure in seeing the clunky early iterations of the later Games’ slick social machinations.

It may not always sing like a songbird when taken as a whole, but The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes still packs a venomous bite at its best.

...retains the hard edge that made most of these movies register as piercing satires of our reality-television age.

Ballad sanitizes its brutality for a PG-13 rating and diminishes the story’s sense of high-stakes survive-or-die suspense, and Francis Lawrence’s approach to action sequences is bland and uninspired, a reflection of the film’s generic visual aesthetic.

A surprisingly bleak yet narratively elemental mishmash of derivative dystopian tropes, the film's real subversion exists in the delightfully garish and incredibly callous supporting characters bedazzling the decadent capital of Panem.