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(1990– ). American actress.
After Lawrence
first became prominent by relentlessly displaying her morose temperament in the
unpleasant rural drama Winter's Bone (2010), she was improbably
recruited to play major roles in two science fiction franchises. Of her
undistinguished performances as the shapeshifting mutant Raven in X-Men:
First Class (2011), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), and X-Men:
Apocalypse (2016), all one needs to note is that, despite her evident
bankability, no one has ever proposed a spinoff Raven movie, and the
disappointing earnings of the third film suggest that audiences are
increasingly less than thrilled by Lawrence and the rest of this particular
group of X-Men. (Indeed, the next film's announced title—X-Men: The New
Mutants—signals that a reboot without Lawrence and her colleagues is on
its way.)
I am better
acquainted with her Katniss Everdeen, since I have carefully watched and reviewed
all four entries in the Hunger Games series—The Hunger Games (2012), The
Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part
1 (2014) and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 2 (2015)—and
while anyone can understand why these stories appeal to younger viewers with an
exaggerated sense of their own importance, the films don't work nearly as well
as they should, largely due to the utter implausibility of Lawrence's
unendingly dour character emerging as the universally adored icon of the
rebellion. Indeed, the scripts seem to include excessive amounts of dialogue
about how much she is loved by the masses in order to compensate for the fact
that she is so conspicuously unlovable.
Now that the
steady employment provided by those series has ended, Lawrence's long-term
survival as a top-tier box office draw will hinge upon her ability to choose
projects shrewdly, yet her decision to join the cast of Passengers
(2016) is not a promising harbinger, inasmuch as its writers could never achieve
a satisfactory conclusion for their story, and matters were not helped by an
evident script rewrite to emphasize how amazingly wonderful Lawrence's
character is. So it is said that a solitary man on an interstellar spaceship,
with thousands of hibernating women to choose from, would unhesitatingly select
Lawrence to serve as his companion—because, after all, she is both an
astoundingly beautiful woman and a brilliantly talented writer. Unfortunately,
Lawrence is not actually all that beautiful, the screenwriters could not come
up with any samples of the character's writing that were genuinely impressive,
and the actress, who apparently never attended college, was apparently unable
or unmotivated to suggest any improvements. As noted, there were intrinsic
problems with the film, but its failure can also be attributed to its casting,
and I'm not talking about Chris PRATT.
As of 2017,
Lawrence's announced future plans, thankfully, do not include any additional
science fiction films, which means that I will not have to suffer through
another one of her doggedly ineffervescent performances. As for the millions of
viewers who keep flocking to the theatres to watch her at work, all one can say
is—there's no accounting for taste.
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