The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

Welcome to the fourth film of

The Hunger Gamezzzzzzz

Grade: C

Director: Francis Lawrence

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Donald Sutherland, Woody Harrelson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, Willow Shields, Elizabeth Banks, Natalie Dormer and Jeffrey Wright

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 17 min.

The career path of Jennifer Lawrence parallels the character arc of Katniss Everdeen, from reluctant combatant to reluctant heroine to reluctant messiah. Lawrence, fresh off an unlikely Oscar nomination for Winter’s Bone when she debuted in the first Hunger Games, is now a three-time nominee and winner for Silver Linings Playbook. At just age 25, she’s outgrown this franchise, and the weariness shows.

Mockingjay – Part 2 is the monotonous end to an elongated finale marching towards inevitability. The only change that came from splitting author Suzanne Collins’ final book in the Hunger Games trilogy into two films is the unfortunate subtext now accompanying talk of enemies that “do not share our values,” and its depiction of war refugees amassing on the Capitol, embedded with assassins bent on killing the nation’s president. And the sight of Philip Seymour Hoffman over 21 months after his death.

Still the PR face of the revolution against President Snow (Donald Sutherland, the only actor who “gets” the inanity), Katniss is charged with wandering into war zones after the battles have been fought to film propos to motivate the rebels. She inexplicably pines for poor Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), last seen trying to strangle Katniss due to Snow’s brutal brainwashing, which we don’t see. Team Gayle (Liam Hemsworth) is summarily disbanded, and a bunch of characters get their curtain calls, like Effie (Elizabeth Banks), Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) and Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci). Meanwhile, rebel leader Alma Coin (Julianne Moore) isn’t above bombing civilians in order to liberate the 13 Districts of Panem.

It’s a two-hour-plus tedium of “shoot-yammer-kiss-rinse-repeat.” The dialogue is stilted and still stuck to the page, while the action sequences are sporadic and narratively inconsequential—it’s a movie about a war without the war. Instead, Mockingjay – Part 2 is about the ethicality of war, about the corrupting belief that the ends justify any means. But these messages are conveyed here in the most mundane, least imaginative terms.

In the unimaginative hands of director Francis Lawrence, any intrigue and emotion are drained away in deference to dutiful adaptation—the most emotion Jennifer Lawrence displays is while yelling at a cat. The entire film exists to service a 10-minute twist you could see coming an entire movie ago, and the heroine who ultimately embraces the bucolic benefits of motherhood. This is how The Hunger Games end, not with a bang but with a whimper.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1

The people have spoken: how many 

"Hunger Games" movies should have been made.

Grade: Incomplete

Director: Francis Lawrence

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Donald Sutherland, Woody Harrelson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, Willow Shields, Elizabeth Banks, Natalie Dormer and Jeffrey Wright

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 3 min.

During the The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1 (hereinafter Mockingjay – Part 1), Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and her fellow rebels flee underground to escape an aerial bombardment by the Capitol’s forces. Holed up in a dark bunker, Katniss passes the time by shining a flashlight at her pet cat Buttercup and watching with amusement as the feline futilely follows the darting but insubstantial luminescence.

The scene is couched as a metaphor for the manner President Snow (Donald Sutherland) and the all-powerful Capitol is toying with the insurgents. It’s equally applicable to the band of moviegoers huddled in darkened theaters, entranced by the incandescent glow of a silver screen sequel that portends promise but delivers precious little. Mockingjay – Part 1 is almost entirely centered around the marketing of a rebellion, which is oddly appropriate for the film adaptation of a book that’s split in two in order to wring out every cent of box-office potential.

It’s The Matrix: Revolutions of The Hunger Games film series. There’s Zion, in the form of an underground city housing the rebel inhabitants of District 13. Like Neo, Katniss is in full messianic mode after her defiant arrow in the Quarter Quell triggered widespread arisings throughout Panem. Moreover, the film is a tedious progenitor that exclusively subsists on its already strip-mined mythology.

When Katniss awakes in District 13, President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore, borrowing Meryl Streep’s wig from “The Giver”), PR flack Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and the other leaders of the rebellion ask her to serve as the symbol for their cause, the “Mockingjay.” The totalitarian Capitol is suppressing freedoms. The Mockingjay emblem has been banned. Summary executions are being carried out throughout the districts. And District 12, Katniss’ home, lies in ruin, littered with the charred remains of its 10,000 citizens.

“But where’s my motivation!?” Katniss seems to ask. Sadly, that requires a District 8 hospital full of wounded, which is promptly destroyed by Snow as soon as Katniss and a camera crew pay it a visit looking for inspiring verite footage for their war promo. Done and done. Plutarch and Beetee (Jeffrey Wright) produce the “propos,” Cressida (Natalie Dormer) is brought on to put Katniss through her paces, and Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) is in charge of wardrobe.

On the opposite side of the propaganda war is Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), who is being held inside the Capitol and, perhaps against his will, beaming out disinformation about Katniss and the rebellion during a series of televised interviews. Katniss wants Peeta rescued, but she also pines for Gale (Liam Hemsworth). And while the Team Gale/Team Peeta narrative goes nowhere fast, Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) is unwisely relegated to sporadic court jester.

“Moves and countermoves,” Snow mutters at one point, and nothing better describes the entirety of the film’s plodding plotline. The true misstep of Mockingjay – Part 1 is the obvious padding it fashions around a two-hour movie about half of Suzanne Collins’ YA novel. Katniss and Gale go hunting and sit by a river, for no purpose. Katniss croons “The Hanging Tree” for the cameras, again while sitting by a river. Katniss kills a few minutes chasing after her sister Primrose (Willow Shields) after she decides to save Buttercup just as the blast doors are closing before a bombing attack. “I just couldn’t live with myself,” Willow whimpers without any apparent sense of context.

But mostly it’s endless speechifying from Katniss, from Snow, from Peeta, from Finnick (Sam Claflin) and especially Coin, shrewdly cast as far less monstrous as Snow but no less dictatorial. There’s a moment late in the film that conveys the film’s apparent aim when, as the rebel leader is delivering one of her innumerable pep talks, we glimpse Plutarch in the background, mouthing along the words to his speech. It’s a Wag the Dog moment that conveys how selling a war is an integral part of winning one. But it’s also a point that could have been established in a couple of scenes, not the entire feature-length film. After all, the previous Hunger Games attacked reality television and economic inequality, but not at the expense of a storyline.

Like Katniss, Lawrence puts gumption behind her cause—aside from one crying scene too many, she does nothing here to tarnish her acting luster playing a character that now feels suddenly stagnant. It’s the leaden messaging that weighs down this perfunctory placeholder. Maybe Katniss will shoot more than one arrow in Mockingjay – Part 2. Let’s hope so, because the lethargic Part 1 wildly misses the mark.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

This Stormtrooper doesn't mean I'm in

the new Star Wars sequel ... I think

Grade: C +

Director: Francis Lawrence

Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Donald Sutherland, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Stanley Tucci, Lenny Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright, Sam Claflin and Jena Malone

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hr. 26 min.

For proof positive of the critical capital that Jennifer Lawrence has already amassed, look no further than the early plaudits being heaped on The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, the second installment of the Suzanne Collins-penned trilogy. This otherwise banal actioner, with its darker-than-average themes, rests firmly on the able shoulders of its 23-year-old Oscar-winning star.

And while Lawrence’s presence saites critics, her role as Katniss Everdeen is cobbled from a Whitman’s Sampler of pop cultural influences. She shoots arrows like Legolas. She’s embroiled in her very own love triangle—Team Gale or Team Peeta? And, her rise in status to societal savior from a totalitarian overlord is Neo-esque. Indeed, for all the Battle Royale and The Running Man allusions in the premise to The Hunger Games, its sequel is more akin to The Matrix Reloaded: a bridge film that laces its protagonist’s messianic maturation into a middling, muddled plotline.

Fresh off their Hunger Games win, Katniss (Lawrence) and Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) are conscripted by President Snow (Donald Sutherland) into a victory tour to quell rising restlessness throughout the 12 districts. While Katniss and Peeta are able to mask their mutual antipathy for the cameras, they aren’t so good at hiding their distaste for Snow’s oppressive regime. Of course, the fact that Snow oscillates between entertainment diversions and public executions and floggings doesn’t really instill a sense of stability amongst the masses.

So, Snow declares that the 75th Annual Hunger Games, aka the Quarter Quell, will feature tributes (players) who are reaped (chosen) from the existing pool of past victors. Snow confides in new game master Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman) that this format is designed to purge the districts of tributes who have gotten too uppity, a concern that doesn’t appear to actually exist until Snow breaks the pledge of lifelong financial security made to those who previously survived the gauntlet of the Games.

Although this Hunger Games: All-Star Edition promises a cunning competition like none before, the way the narrative eventually unfolds—culminating with an abrupt cliffhanger—utterly undercuts this construct. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with Jennifer Lawrence in the spotlight, Catching Fire is essentially two-thirds fashion show and one-third recycled action sequences. And amid the dourness, only Stanley Tucci—all ponytail and pearly caps—provides any perceptible energy as TV emcee Caesar Flickerman.

Indeed, whatever profundity is in Catching Fire concerns the manner a co-opted media is a powerful, dangerous weapon in the hands of a government trying to tame its populace. Still, this hardly revelatory concept isn’t enough to fill the 146-minute running time—indeed, The Hunger Games is what viewers play who watch this film on an empty stomach. And if that’s still not enough Katniss and Co. for you, take heart that Collins’ final book, Mockingjay, is going to be split into two films. You know, like Twilight: Breaking Dawn and the entire Hobbit series. What could go wrong with that?