The Hunger Games: Mockingjay –
Part 2
Director: Francis
Lawrence
Writers: Peter
Craig, Danny Strong, Suzanne Collins
Starring: Jennifer
Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Woody Harrelson, Donald
Sutherland, Julianne Moore
Rating: Three and a
half stars out of five
Available in
theaters now.
The Hunger Games
series, on its surface, reflects the cultural fears of a society
bombarded with tracking and surveillance from every corner.
Institutions that were already powerful only seem to grow
exponentially, and stories like those of Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer
Lawrence) serve as reminders that we should not allow such power
grabs to occur. But those themes represent negativity in the literal
sense. They are about preventing and/or taking away something. “Every
action has an equal and opposite reaction,” in this case a
totalitarian governing system trying to somehow gain more totality
and being pushed back against by a citizenry, led by a teenager with
a superhuman level of calmness, that has had enough.
Those themes and
plot machinations are powerful in themselves, but they are not what
makes the Hunger Games movies, including this final
installment, Mockingjay – Part 2, special in an aspirational
sense. If these films were merely about government overreach, the
brutality and cunning greed of the powerful, and the tolls exacted by
physical and emotional trauma, they would be, at best, distanced and
academic, and at worst, propaganda for the paranoid. They would only
be about the removal of something, a punishment of those in power for
their hubris and cruelty. They would offer nothing to build on,
nothing to latch onto besides base self-preservation.
But the series goes
further than that, and thanks to the heavy lifting of the earlier
entries, Mockingjay – Part 2 gets to use as a shorthand the
themes that make this saga resonate: the various types of love a
person can have for others, and the ways those loves can motivate one
to react with a semblance of grace to a world of hostile stimuli.
This time out, the grand gestures of the earlier films – “I
volunteer as tribute” and numerous other sacrifices made to protect
the friends and families of various characters – are subtext,
largely unspoken but understood by the protagonist and her immediate
support group.
There exists
romantic love, between Katniss and her lifelong friend Gale (Liam
Hemsworth), and between Katniss and Josh Hutcherson's Peeta, with
whom she has shared experiences nobody but the two of them can
understand. There are degrees to which these loves differ, of course.
But beneath the battered, traumatized stress of the civil war they
find themselves embroiled in, there are hints of “butterflies in
the stomach” happiness one finds with their partners. Finding a
partner, however, is not the driving force of Katniss's heart,
though, for her little sister, Primrose (Willow Shields) and mother
(Paula Malcomson) are there to form a symbiotic relationship of
give-and-take nurturing. When the hollowness takes over – having an
actress of Lawrence's quality here really helps sell this, as you can
see the longing for peace take over behind her eyes during quiet
moments – for them, the others take over in measured, usually
silent ways. Wordless hugs and concerned glances are the currency of
reassurance in the Everdeen clan, and these are the things that will
ring true for those watching the Hunger Games films for years
to come.
Unfortunately,
Mockingjay – Part 2 suffers from the same broken quality its
predecessor did, more as a function of commerce than storytelling
necessity. Both of these films feel arbitrarily stretched and chopped
up in order to extend the series's moneymaking capability by another
entry. This throws a wrench into the plans of the rising and falling
action that naturally take place if they were created as a single
movie. The first Mockingjay had the hook of exploring the
importance of propaganda to both sides of a conflict, but the second
lacks that juicy quality. In its place is fairly straightforward
action that pays off the buildup of the previous films admirably, but
it is missing the setup within itself to be a wholly satisfying
individual story.
Director Francis
Lawrence's attention to pacing within action set pieces, which was
such a treat in the saga's second movie, Catching Fire, leaves
a little to be desired. The death of a critical character comes
perilously close to going unnoticed among a rapid-fire series of
deaths by subterranean mutants' hands – the mutants' character
designs are a nice shoutout to Neil Marshall's The Descent,
though. The most important, gut-wrenching death of any Hunger
Games film, though, is even closer to being wiped away by
too-quick editing. If ever there were a moment to hold and really
take an audience's breath away, this is the time. However, it's gone
in the blink of an eye so the film can move onto the revenge sequence
triggered by it – although the steady fatalism of the revenge is a
subdued in a satisfactory way.
But Mockingjay –
Part 2's saving grace is tied in with its faults. The longform
storytelling of a series allows for the previous movies to act as
prologue, meaning this one does not necessarily need to do all the
heavy lifting on its own. Viewed as a singular piece of moviemaking,
it's slightly deficient, but as part of a four-picture whole, its
form is something to behold. The tension between those urges –
single serving vs. prolonged arc – could probably be played more
deftly, but the payoff of Mockingjay – Part 2 is strong
enough to still be a success.
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