'The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes' Spoiler-Free Review
Image Source: IGN
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is the latest book by author Suzanne Collins, bringing us back to the world of Panem, though this time, sixty years before Katniss Everdeen shook things up. It follows a young Coriolanus Snow as he becomes a mentor for the female District 12 tribute, and the trials therein.
Now, full disclosure, I’m coming at this film review as somebody who read (listened to) the book, so I do have that bias of things being/not being as I imagined them, as well as the knowledge of what happens in the story, what was changed, what was added and removed, and so forth. As an adaptation of the book, they didn’t do too poorly; there were several worries that I had when I saw the cast list and trailer that mostly amounted to nothing.
Mostly.
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The cast is obviously important. The film had to live or die by the performances of Snow and his tribute, Lucy Gray Baird. How did they do? Pretty well, actually, especially the actress for Lucy Gray. Songs are an important part of the character, and she nailed each and every one of them. Snow was…fine. He played the role as needed, and that was that.
Image source: EW
(Slim Shady vibes, anyone?)
You could say that for most of the actors in the film. None of them were horrible, but a lot of them aren’t meaty roles, especially since a lot of moments and conversations that would add character depth had to be cut for time. That’s just the nature of filmmaking.
The highlight of the film, though, was easily Jason Schwartzman as Lucky Flickerman. He was absolutely hilarious, but at the same time, they didn’t overuse him to the point where he became annoying. He was easy to see as the ancestor of Caesar Flickerman from the original trilogy. He had lines that literally made me laugh out loud, in a good way.
There were some missteps, though. Viola Davis is a fantastic, Oscar-winning actress, but I’m not sure if she was miscast or written poorly. They were going for “mad scientist“ and made her into a cartoon character, removing any depth or menace from the character in the book. The other casting misstep was Peter Dinklage. Again, he’s a fantastic actor, but he didn’t bring any of the gravitas necessary to play Dean Highbottom. If they desperately wanted a Game of Thrones actor to play the dean, Charles Dance was right there! A morphine addict who’s struggling with his demons and past, but is far from weak, and has an undeniable gravitas around him.
(Actually, now that I think about it, that was his character in Alien 3.)
In any case, the performances were fine for the most part. Nothing terrible, with the highlights being Lucky Flickerman and Lucy Gray.
The story follows the book really closely, which is overall a good thing, though there are some changes here and there. Most of them are in service of a book-to-movie transition, so there wasn’t much in there that was distracting. The ending was fairly weak, but it’s not that great in the book either, so their hands were tied on that one.
Overall, the movie wasn’t top-tier cinema, but it wasn’t terrible either. It had its moments, and for the most part did its job well.
Final score: 6.5/10
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