Josh Hutcherson – Memphis Flyer

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay-Part 2 is the latest in a growing series of films whose title contain both a colon and a hyphen, like The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn-Part 1. The paired punctuation has come to indicate a mangling by studio money-grubbing—one story has been split into two movies, and padding applied, to get you to shell out twice for closure.

Mockingjay completes The Hunger Games‘ unlikely transition from winking high school allegory to grimdark military science fiction. Our beloved heroine, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) begins part two in a familiar setting: a hospital bed, recovering from wounds she received in battle. In this case, she was put in the hospital by her former fiancé and fellow survivor of the arena, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), who was brainwashed into hating her by the forces of the Capitol, led by President Snow (Donald Sutherland). Sporting the thousand-yard PTSD stare she adopted in Part 1, Katniss meets with the leader of the rebels, President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore), and agrees to drop her former ethical reservations and do whatever it takes to defeat the Capitol. She is immediately thrust into battle in District 2 beside her second love interest, Gale (Liam Hemsworth), in an effort to destroy the last enemy stronghold blocking the way to an advance on the Capitol. When the post-battle evacuation of civilians threatens to turn into a riot, Katniss manages to partially defuse the situation before being shot by a loyalist refugee. After once again waking up in a hospital bed, she vows to personally kill Snow. Katniss defies the authority of Coin and her propaganda minister Plutarch Heavansbee (the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose absence the filmmakers work around with fragments of dialogue and CGI) to get into the battle at the Capitol, where the rebels must fight their way through a booby-trapped city to topple Snow’s teetering regime.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay-Part 2

There’s a core of classic sci-fi running through all of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games novels, which became best sellers in the vacuum left by the completion of the Harry Potter cycle. One of the interesting things about Harry Potter is its author, J.K. Rowling, offered a decidedly female take on the formerly male-dominated realm of epic fantasy, and the same dynamic is at work with Collins in the world of dystopian science fiction. Katniss is an action hero, but she’s also a reality TV star who has her own stylist. The story focuses very tightly on her character, and her two would-be boyfriends get about as much development as your typical Bond girl. The dystopia Collins paints is an artfully rendered funhouse mirror-version of contemporary America—surely, the Capitol is the most garish evil empire in film history.

Unfortunately, the film adaptations have not served Collins’ vision as well as the Harry Potter films did Rowling’s. The first film was barely competent, and the second was only an incremental improvement. The only great thing about the franchise has been Lawrence’s muscular, multifaceted portrayal of Katniss. And if Mockingjay had been just one movie, Lawrence might have finally gotten a film worthy of her talents. Katniss has grown from scared country girl to a hardened warrior who can take a nap as the dropship flies her to the war zone. At least director Francis Lawrence has the good sense to bring the series to a close by hiring a decent editor and giving Lawrence lots of close-ups.

But like The Hobbit films, there’s just no saving the movie from the financial imperative to split the story. There’s a solid two-hour movie buried somewhere in the 260-minute combined running time of the two Mockingjays, but, as it is, the beats just fall in all the wrong places. Part 2 builds some decent tension, particularly in a claustrophobic sequence where our heroes fight mutant attack zombies in the Capitol’s sewers, but the overall structure has been so fatally compromised that Katniss just seems to drift around in a haze of nonsensical plot complications. When our long-suffering hero gets her much-deserved rest, we share her relief that it’s finally over.

Being the final chapter ain’t what it used to be. Nowadays, movie trilogies are likely to have four parts, thanks to the monetary aspirations of quarterly corporate profit-driven movie studios, robbing part three of its catharsis. It happened to Twilight, whose third literary chapter got uselessly split into two parts. The original plan to make The Hobbit into two movies got expanded into three, which meant that significant parts of the first two movies felt like the padding they were. And it happened to Harry Potter, whose closing chapter, The Deathly Hallows, was split in two a bit more successfully. Would Return of the Jedi have been better split into two parts with added Ewok action to fill in the gaps? Probably not. But it would seem that The Hunger Games film franchise has actually benefitted from splitting its final chapter in two, because Mockingjay – Part 1 is the best of the three films released so far.

The franchise got off to a rocky start in 2012 with the first film, where hero Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) volunteered to take the place of her sister Prim (Willow Shields) in the brutal gladiatorial-game-meets-reality-show that gives the series its name. Despite feeling rushed and incoherent, the first film made wheelbarrows full of money for Lionsgate and cemented Lawrence’s star status. For Catching Fire, the producers wisely ditched director Gary Ross in favor of Francis Lawrence, who could at least stage a coherent action sequence, and sent Katniss back into the arena for a tournament of champions designed to discredit and kill the increasingly popular Girl On Fire. But our heroine survived, thanks to her out-of-the-box thinking and the actions of game-designer-turned-revolutionary Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

As this third film opens, Katniss is fighting her raging PTSD in the rebel base deep under District 13. One of her two beaus Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) didn’t make it out of the arena, but is still alive and being used as a propaganda shill by President Snow (a gleefully evil Donald Sutherland). Her other potential lover Gale (Liam Hemsworth) escaped the holocaust of District 12 and is now fighting for rebel President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore). Heavensbee and Coin want to use Katniss as a figurehead for the rebellion, but will the young woman known as The Mockingjay take up her mantle as a freedom fighter?

The weakness of splitting the final chapter of the story is that it makes Katniss’ internal struggle the film’s major conflict. Of course Katniss is going to take up her newly tricked-out bow against the evil Capitol, just like every hero since Odysseus has eventually responded after first refusing the call to adventure. But the strength of Mockingjay – Part 1 comes from the fact that the director and writers don’t have to cram so many plot incidents from the dense source material into a regulation-sized movie, and so they are able to stretch out and focus on their greatest strength: Lawrence.

Katniss is the hero our moment needs: She’s a working-class feminist fighting Das Kapital, represented by the patriarch Snow. She is tasteful and restrained in the face of the gaudy, late-stage capitalism of the ruling class — is there another epic adventure star who counts a stylist and a PR flack among their heroic band? She is a reality-TV star who sees through the artifice of the weaponized entertainment complex that is keeping her people subjugated. Like Humphrey Bogart’s Rick or Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones, Lawrence fully inhabits Katniss as a character while also imbuing her with that mysterious movie star magic. Wearing the fierce thousand-yard stare of a seasoned warrior, she is the charismatic Che Guevara to President Coin’s calculating Castro. Then she furtively includes her sister’s cat among her list of demands to her new bosses, and you realize she’s still a teenage girl. Lawrence outshines everyone else on the screen, even to the point of undermining the romantic triangle with Peeta and Gale. It’s clear that neither one of these drips are worthy of Katniss, just as it’s clear that there are few projects 21st century Hollywood could come up with that are worthy of Lawrence, so she had to make The Hunger Games her own.