The Hunger Games prequel will give you indigestion, writes BRIAN VINER

The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes review: This endless prequel will give you indigestion, writes BRIAN VINER

The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes

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When movie producers finally exhaust a story after bombarding us with sequels, they stretch it in a different direction by turning to the prequels.

Anything to avoid sending the cash cow off for slaughter. So that’s what we have here. Katniss Everdeen, the role that turned Jennifer Lawrence into a major star, has yet to be born.

This film continues the stories told in the Suzanne Collins young-adult novels about grim, dystopian, survival battles between children chosen by the 12 districts of the state of Panem.

But it is set six decades before the events chronicled in The Hunger Games (2012), with the English actor Tom Blyth as the young Coriolanus Snow (the ruthless tyrant played in the original series by Donald Sutherland).

Tom Blyth as Coriolanus Snow and Rachel Zegler as Lucy Gray Baird in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

For now his fascist leanings are a long way off, indeed, he seems to be a decent, principled cove, who takes seriously his responsibilities towards the spirited young woman he is expected to mentor for the next Games

She is Lucy Gray Baird, the songbird of the title played by Rachel Zegler (who burst into the limelight as Maria in Spielberg’s West Side Story) with the kind of Southern accent that cheesy grits would have if they could talk.

She does a nice job, and so does Blyth, with old hands such as Peter Dinklage and Viola Davis adding dramatic muscle and Jason Schwartzman stealing the laughs, much as Stanley Tucci did in the earlier films, as slimy TV presenter Lucky Flickerman.

If you bought into the first four instalments, then you will doubtless have fun, but it seemed to me to go on for ever, and be warned, for a film rated 12A there’s an awful lot of violence.

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