Jennifer Lawrence suits up as Katniss Everdeen for a final time in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (Image © Lionsgate).
I’m going to try and keep this quick for two reasons. First, I don’t want to inadvertently drop a spoiler bomb and second, I’m gonna do my best to minimize how much I tick off the more forgiving fans of The Hunger Games.
It’s official. The best movie in the series is The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and the worst one is The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2. Part 1 may have been a bit slow and bloated but this happened because it tried to set everything up for the finale. So what’s the finale’s excuse for being slow and bloated?
Coming in at 137 minutes long, the people responsible for this film somehow thought that the weakest novel in the trilogy needed to be stretched out into over 4 and a half hours of run-time. That’s the first sin. I’m positive that some day someone out there will edit parts 1 and 2 together into a 100 minute film and it will be fantastic. Until then, you’re stuck with this.
Ugh, okay. Enough complaining, let’s get to some observations.
This movie is BORING. I felt like a fidgety five year old in the theater. There are huge swaths of nothing happening and that doesn’t make any damn sense. This is supposed to be the finale! How did you manage to shove so many scenes into the film that don’t matter at all?
The acting is underwhelming. The only characters who do anything interesting is Josh Hutcherson as he convincingly displays Peeta’s inner turmoil and Donald Sutherland’s cold, manipulative President Snow. The other good actors like Woody Harrelson and Elizabeth Banks are minimized. Julianne Moore is handicapped by the movie taking a ‘turn’ that isn’t really hinted at. Jennifer Lawrence disappoints this time because all she’s asked to do is alternate between angry and confused. All the other supporting characters are completely forgettable and interchangeable.
Notice how half the characters were handicapped by the plot? Yeah. There’s a reason for that. The whole film is slow and plodding. How the heck did they have a hard time making an exciting finish to a decent trilogy? I’ll admit that the third novel was my least favorite but I still devoured it in a few days. It deserved better than to be turned into a Lord of the Rings length movie. It also wasn’t built to be that long. There wasn’t enough detail in the book to handle this and it shows.
The special effects were nice but even there I was still hugely disappointed. My biggest complaint of the first Hunger Games film was that the filmmakers shied away from showing the hounds as they were described in the book. Here we get ‘more’ of the movie hounds and I was reminded just how boring they are. Seriously, they look like rejected ideas from Event Horizon or The Descent.
I could, but shouldn’t, go on. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 is a dull thud of finale. It bored the hell out of me and it had almost as many endings as the final Lord of the Rings movie. A bunch of us in the theater were on the edge of our seats for the last ten minutes, not because it was excited, but because we were ready to leave.
