The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part II delivers a nice emotional punch to the gut–if ever a grim thing like that could be categorized as ‘nice’. It opens immediately where the last film left off, with mouth piece Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) trying to free an oppressed nation with the backing of a rebel militia.
The Girl on Fire is on a mission to take names and dismantle tyranny one district at a time. On top of dealing with a full fledged rebellion, Katniss has a number of personal issues to reconcile.
She has her personal mission to assassinate President Snow, selling propaganda, restoring a mentally arrested Peeta to a normal state of mind, looking after a sister who is coming of age and, most importantly, picking which guy in her love triangle to spend the rest of her foreseeable life with. Will it be Star-Crossed Lover Bae or Forever Friendzoned Bae?
Liam Hemsworth and Josh Hutcherson return as Gale Hawthorne and Peeta Mellark, respectively. Gale functions as someone who forfeits love with the only girl he has ever loved and is just as easily discarded.
His lover-scorned attitude warrants some second hand embarrassment but where he fails in the romance department he makes up for it by being a capable and willing soldier. In fact, his detached but understandable sentiments about total war tactics come seemingly from left field but are unsurprisingly in line with his wooden personality.
In the past three outings, Hemsworth has never able to push Gale into something resembling a fully realized character (which may be the fault of the limited material he is given and the lack of character development he is offered). All the more reason for audiences to favor Peeta.
Speaking of the second lead, Hutcherson’s Peeta is the linchpin in Katniss’ story arc just as assuredly as he is the pin in the grenade that is her mission to take down the Capitol. Although it can be obvious at times, he does an excellent job of portraying Peeta’s torn psyche, a simple and kind hearted baker tortured and brainwashed by President Snow into thinking Katniss is his enemy.
Those who they are leading a revolution against are President Snow and the Capitol, comprised of privileged people who don’t know strife and whose children were never subjected to the Hunger Games. I’m always mildly disgusted when Donald Sutherland shows up in a scene.
His President Snow is a well dressed, soul-less dictator with a beady glint in his eyes. Sutherland plays him with a simmering relish that leads to an excellent pay off in the final act. He’s what I imagine a moneyed Krampus in a crushed velvet sports jacket and button up vest would look like. He is, after all, a child devouring monster.
President Snow’s foil, played by Julianne Moore, isn’t quite as compelling. While they are called public servants for a reason, President Snow and Coin seem to miss that point, using and then throwing away selective citizens of Panem as a means to an end.
One of those pawns is Katniss but she is the one game piece that can’t be control. She is Divergent–I mean, the Mockingjay. After seeing Lawrence in many other more impressive performances, watching her in the Hunger Games movies is always underwhelming.
Katniss, as a character in film and in the novels, has never been a particularly interesting case study. As Haymitch once accurately put it, she has about as much charm “as a dead slug”. What makes her are the supporting characters around her, although, in this outing, while a number of actors are serviceable in their roles, they aren’t as fleshed out as they could have been.
Couple that with the rushed deaths of a handful of good supporting characters–those of which felt more like a fizzling punch-line than a satisfactory pay off–and it’s clear to see that they were cheaply wasted.
As a final showdown, Mockingjay Part II is noticeably gutted by the studio’s decision to split the film into two parts, Mockingjay Part I (2014) getting the shorter end of the stick as far as story-telling material. The first film is all set up, the second film is all pay off with some build up but unfortunately that year gap between releases did no favors for the suspense.
The beginning and end of the movie do drag on for quite a bit. The conclusion suffers from what can only be described as Return of the King Syndrome. For those not versed in the lore of director Peter Jackson’s adaptation of J.R.R Tolkien’s work, Return of the King is the third and final installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy which has at least four endings too many.
Just when the screen fades to black and you think you can go to the bathroom, another scene fades in and all you can do is cry and wonder when will it end? While this movie handles the emotional drama, political themes and darker tones much better, its predecessor Catching Fire (2013) yielded to much better and more engaging pacing and action.
What the movie gets right is a far better sense of action direction in that it is less sanitized than sequences in the previous films and many other Young Adult franchises. Director Francis Lawrence, who took over for Hunger Games director Gary Ross in 2012, has shaped the franchise into something much more ambitious and visually appealing.
Even the world building and set design this time around felt as if it had more depth. Now that It-Girl Lawrence’s schedule is freed up from the YA genre she has plenty more room to do other career expanding things–like make a million more David O. Russell movies with Bradley Cooper.
Zhana Johnson
Senior Features Editor