Review: ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2’

“The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2” is finally here, bringing yet another film franchise to a close, this time the story of Panem, the land in which wealth disparity is the name of the game and open rebellion is all the poor people have left. After the episodic feel of the second movie and the incredibly boring wheel spinning of the third movie, we finally have here a movie with scenes featuring characters doing stuff, with final goals in sight and ultimate sacrifices ready to be made. It took several years, a number of films, and hundreds of millions of dollars, but we finally have a conclusion, an ending, a sense of finality…but was it all worth it?

In this final film we pick up with Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) and the rest of the rebellion, planning their final missions that will have them secure weapons for their final assault on the Capitol, in which they will attempt to overthrow the dominant paradigm by ousting cruel President Snow (Donald Sutherland) and making Panem a free country with open elections…you know, good old democracy. But just as Katniss has been a reluctant participant in the rebellion, offering her services as the face of the rebellion mostly due to her hatred of President Snow, in this last movie she openly questions the actions of the rebels, who are willing to kill many civilians in order to advance their own cause. She sees the horrors of war firsthand and she recoils. She would rather everyone just worked together to take out Snow and be done with it, but war isn’t easy, and the rebellion gets messy, and she doesn’t like it.

But then she participates anyway because if she didn’t we wouldn’t have a movie. So she heads in to the Capitol with a small team of rebels and they slowly make their way block by block through the city in order to reach the main mansion in the middle of the city in which Snow lives, and slowing them down are many traps set all over the city, all of them reminiscent of the Hunger Games battles that Katniss went through in the first two movies.  At the same time, Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) is suffering from the affects of a brainwashing session the Capitol put him through, so he struggles with an implanted desire to kill Katniss in order to stop the rebellion, and for some reason he is put with Katniss’s group, so they have to worry about being killed by booby traps as well as being killed by this guy who can’t keep it together. And there’s also the world’s most chaste love triangle between Katniss, Peeta and Gale (Liam Hemsworth), as Katniss is finally going to have to decide which of these two guys she will continue to barely show any affection towards for the rest of her life.

Really, there is no way to watch this movie without having seen the previous movies, and even then a couple of things confused me in the moment, as I never read the books and have only seen each movie one time during their initial theatrical runs. So I forgot that Peeta was brainwashed and I forgot about whatever happened to Jena Malone’s character (actually I forgot she was even in these movies to being with) and when there is a seemingly random wedding scene in the first third of the movie, I was deep in “I don’t care” territory. Who were these people? Why were they getting married? Why is this a scene in the movie? I bet it had bigger significance in the books and it is included in the movie in order to sate fans of the original books who would howl with rage if it was omitted, despite the fact that it doesn’t play in to anything else in this story. So this isn’t the kind of thing that you can just jump in and start watching. You have to watch the previous six-plus hours of Hunger Gaming in order to really know the score here.

Also I can see why a movie like this would be released during the fall or winter months instead of during the Summer Blockbuster Season because quite frankly it gets pretty dour at times, and instead of ending with a huge battle and clear cut victory, it ends with political machinations and the fall out of the rebellion, along with some mourning and a little bit of betrayal, and it doesn’t exactly scream “good times.” And at the very least I can commend these stories for doing a little more than expected with this young adult dystopian future set story and for not just aiming for a happy, everyone wins ending. Instead of sugarcoating the story or spoon feeding the audience a rousing ending meant to send everyone out of the theater feeling great, “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2” is content with asking some tough questions right at the end and showing our hero as a person who had to make some hard decisions in the face of terrible consequences, a person who has to live with the nightmares brought on by the horrible things she had to do in the name of survival and the rebellion, and it is commendable that this doesn’t have some weird, gross “war is great” mentality, but instead shows the fall out from such actions.

But otherwise, I don’t know, were these movies even really worth it? Katniss is an okay enough character, strong willed and distinct, the reluctant hero all along, and in this particular movie we get to see her be the total bad ass we know she can be, as she has to do some quick and intense fighting with her bow and arrows and does a great job doing it, we can see the toughness and how this can be the type of person people would choose to follow, and being so doubtful and unsure of her actions and the rebellion makes her more interesting, but everyone else around her is boring as hell, especially the love interests in the forms of Peeta and Gale. Everyone else is pretty much interchangeable, and the characters played by Elizabeth Banks and Woody Harrelson feel like they were included just so they could be included, as they really had nothing to do. Also Jeffrey Wright shows up long enough for people to be like, “oh yeah, Jeffrey Wright is in this movie!”

Oh, and there’s a scene in which the rebels are attacked by a bunch of weird CGI humanoid creatures that they call “mutts” and they look like they wandered over from director Francis Lawrence’s other blockbuster-type movie “I Am Legend.” There is exactly one sequence with these weird things and then they disappear. We never saw them before and we never see them again. Kind of a head scratcher that one.

This extended version of Bastille Day via this “Running Man” meets “V For Vendetta” kind of plotting has been okay enough, mild diversions of entertainment at best, and really I am pretty glad it is over and I don’t have to see any more because quite frankly I have grown quite bored with the adventures of Katniss and her ridiculously named friends and contemporaries.

R.I.P. Philip Seymour Hoffman.