MOCKINGJAY - PART 2: Capitol Punishment

Director: Francis Lawrence
Writers: Peter Craig, Danny Strong
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth, Julianne Moore, Woody Harrelson, Donald Sutherland, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Willow Shields, Sam Claflin, Elizabeth Banks, Mahershala Ali, Jena Malone, Jeffrey Wright, Stanley Tucci, Patina Miller, Gwendoline Christie
Runtime: 137 mins.
2015

The real bummer about Mockingjay - Part 2 is how serviceable it is. The first Hunger Games movie had just enough problems that it left me cold, so I was shocked when Catching Fire ended up being one of my favorite movies of 2013. That film is jampacked with memorable characters who are each given a host of personality traits and political affiliations. Then along came Mockingjay - Part 1, a movie which retained all the memorable characters, but mostly had them walk around and talk to each other for two hours. If you can choke your way through my audio review of that movie, you'll hear that I found the actionlessness of Part 1 to be mostly enjoyable. Scenes meandered here and there, but the characters felt lived in, and the movie did some really interesting work with propaganda and symbolism. At any rate, the dullness of Part 1 was supposed to be a necessary byproduct of it being the first of a two-parter.

Now, a year later, we have the final entry, a movie that came with the promise of providing a wham-bang conclusion to one of the most successful movie franchises of our generation, and instead we get... serviceable. This time plenty of stuff happens, to be sure. It's just that nobody seems invested in doing these things. Between Francis Lawrence's workmanlike directing, the screenwriters' straightforward adaptation, and the lead actors' adequate performances, Mockingjay - Part 2 feels like a movie franchise that knows it has ended up one movie longer than it should have been. The franchise has outgrown itself.
That is apparent nowhere more clearly than in the love triangle subplot that has made a curious and ill-advised resurgence. Anyone familiar with the books should remember how much of a driving force the will it be PEETA will it be GALE plot was, and will also recognize just how much of it was excised from Catching Fire and Mockingjay - Part 1. Now here we are at Part 2, and the movie sees fit to thrust it upon us once more, as if the movie were doing some spring cleaning and happened upon an out of date gift that it had "forgotten" to give to us for our birthday four years ago. The execution of the triangle ranges from unconvincing to teeth-grindingly painful, as in one scene when Katniss pretends to be asleep while Gale bumbles over to a handcuffed Peeta and they trade such soulful sentiments as, "Welp... I guess when all this is over she's going to have to pick one of us." All of this builds to a choice that doesn't really end up happening--Katniss just kind of hangs out at the end and one of them shows up and they hang out some more and then at some point she marries him I guess.

Which one would you choose.

This isosceles nonsense goes hand in hand with another of the movie's more obvious faults; Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) is simply not up to the increasing challenges that his role requires. By this point he has been befriended, courted, fake courted, brainwashed, and partially un-brainwashed. The character is a psychological wreck with a lot of complicated and, frankly, convoluted stuff going on under the hood. His behavior in this movie requires Hutcherson to communicate that many-layered and fragile mental state, but he just can't. All he can do is play a baggy eyed sad dog (which is no more or less than he's always done in these movies) until he snaps and kills someone, only to return to the sad dog routine afterward. He repeatedly tells people they should kill him, or that they shouldn't trust him, but they just sit around like lumps not doing anything about it. Then at some point Peeta gets better; it's legitimately comical how Hutcherson plays his transformation from tortured maniac back to good old Katniss-loving Peeta. It's like he just stands up straight and is all better.

The other characters aren't as perturbing. Mahershala Ali plays a great soldier, and there's a cool scene where generals are planning the rebellion's next move, and the four major participants in this military conversation are all women (Katniss, President Coin, Commander Paylor, and Commander Lyme). Yet I can't help but be disappointed that, for a movie this unnecessarily long, they couldn't find anything interesting to do for a great many of the series' most beloved characters. Mockingjay - Part 2 grievously ignores no less than the likes of Haymitch, Plutarch, Johanna, Beetee, Caesar, and even Effie. They're basically cameos, showing up every now and then just so the movie can name check them and prove they haven't been forgotten. This has always been a character-driven series, so it's no surprise that siphoning all the best characters out of the narrative leaves us with a sadly hollow experience.

The movie also fumbles the other advantage of the Hunger Games trilogy: its ideas. Even Part 1 had some cracking good sociopolitical commentary. Part 2 is just an exercise in misery. The story is about the soulkilling horror of war, but it doesn't have anything particularly insightful to say on that topic beyond "yes it certainly is soulkilling," and the ending even manages to dramatically soften that theme. Character after character bite the dust, but it all happens too fast for any of it to register with us in any meaningful way. I can think of a grand total of one philosophically interesting moment in the entire movie.

I'm talking about Part 2 as if it's a crock of crap, and that's far from true. It's a mediocrity that should have been so much better, which hurts even more than a crock of crap could. You know a movie is lifeless when you specifically remember scenes that worked much better in the trailer.

There is one scene that made the entire movie worth watching for me--the only scene where it felt like Lawrence's directorial ears perked up and he got serious with the craftsmanship. I'm talking about the straight up horror sequence in the sewers. We know our heroes aren't getting out of there without a fight, and we know that Snow released mutts to chase them down. What follows is an excruciating crawl through the darkness, punctuated by bursts of light from Gale's flammable crossbow bolts. The suspense is sublime, as there are no fewer than three moments when a lesser filmmaker would have triggered the jump scare, but Lawrence holds off, teasing us like the coy bastard he is. This all culminates in one of the more exquisite jump scares in recent memory. My senses were singing. It helps that the creature designs were pretty damn good too, a more effective and concentrated version of the work Lawrence did on I Am Legend.

Alas, one solitary excellent patch cannot keep a mediocre quilt from being a mediocre quilt. If anything that one good patch would make you feel worse about the general state of your quilt. I am of course referring to movies here, by way of metaphor.

Catching Fire bought enough goodwill from me that I got through Part 1 feeling pretty good about the franchise. Unfortunately, that good feeling was in some ways predicated on the success of Part 2. I'm bummed out that Lawrence and co. couldn't make good on that promise. So long to one of the influential action heroes of our generation. We'll always have your second movie to look back on.

2 / 5  BLOBS