The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 offers less magic

By Katherine Monk

The only downside is: It’s done. After surviving several battles to the death, sowing the seeds of revolution and pulling in more than $2.2 billion at the box-office, Katniss Everdeen can finally rest in peace.

I’ll keep the exact meaning of that phrase vague for now, because who wants to spoil a plot this long in the making, and more importantly, why ruin a perfectly paced action movie that relies on our deep desire to see Katniss live another day?

When this whole ride left the platform in 2012 with The Hunger Games, the first Suzanne Collins book to hit the screen, we immediately fell in love with the young woman who volunteered to take the place of her little sister in the Hunger Games, a ritualized slaughter of ‘tributes’ broadcast on live television.

Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) was brave, smart, skilled and strong, but also undeniably human, prone to bouts of self-loathing, guilt, and punishing doubt. Her vulnerability made her different from the classic masculine hero, which in turn put the whole Hunger Games enterprise on a slightly different axis.

This is a franchise that gets its power from the emotional drama more than the chain reaction propelling the political plot, which is why it could always get away fewer special effects and slightly less glamorous production values than typical Hollywood science fiction.

As long as Jennifer Lawrence is in the frame, we have everything we could ever want because not only is Katniss a sexy collection of Christ-like virtues and Seventeen Magazine psychology, she’s fighting the symbolic battle for tomorrow.

This is a franchise that gets its power from the emotional drama more than the chain reaction propelling the political plot, which is why it could always get away fewer special effects and slightly less glamorous production values than typical Hollywood science fiction.

In the last film, Katniss managed to outsmart the villainous President Snow (Donald Sutherland) and trigger a revolution among the districts.

Now fighting alongside a troop of united districts looking to depose Snow, Katniss has a real chance at ending the tyranny of Panem once and for all, but yet again, there are hurdles to overcome.

The first one is Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) versus Gale (Liam Hemsworth). Katniss has been torn between these two lovers since the saga began, and now that Gale is an outspoken revolutionary and Peeta is a brainwashed tool of Panem’s power elite, it would seem like an easy choice. She should be with Gale, but Katniss doesn’t do what people expect—or even what the audience may want—and that’s why she’s such a kick-ass character.

This is a young woman with her own will, and in this final chapter of the inspirational series, she’s finally free to flex it.

For the first time, Katniss isn’t being forced to comply with someone else’s agenda – be it President Snow’s or Alma Coin’s (Julianne Moore). She’s the one calling her own shots, transferring the full weight of responsibility onto her own shoulders.

This burden has always been the defining force in Katniss’s life, but here, it gets full screen treatment as she leads a rebel group through the smoking rubble of Panem, right up to President Snow’s front door.

There’s a hint of a videogame denouement as she’s forced to negotiate one violent hurdle after another, from a swirling flood of oil to pop-up machineguns, but like other young adult novels set in a dystopian future, these challenges are there for mechanical reasons – as plot engines and mental challenges for the viewer.

But this time around, the problem-solving isn’t that interesting because the scenes are not contained the way they were in the arena. Katniss’s attention is spread over a much larger area as she seeks a complete regime change, and when your scope is global, it’s hard to be intimate.

Mockingjay Part 2 suffers a bit as a result. We don’t get to see the same degree of emotional detail in Lawrence’s performance, nor are we treated to any truly memorable exchanges between characters – which is such a shame when you have players like Woody Harrelson, Stanley Tucci, Julianne Moore and even the late Philip Seymour Hoffman at your disposal.

These older characters always injected the forked tongue wiliness of the modern boomer into the mix: a hint of ennui mingled with razor-sharp cynicism. They were the symbolic pat on the head; the patronizing voice of a parent that strips and diminishes a youthful sense of purpose.

Sutherland and Moore rise to the challenge and make their characters that much bigger, but a little bit more business with Haymitch (Harrelson), Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) and Caesar Flickerman (Tucci) would have made Mockingjay – Part 2 a little bit more intimate, and a lot more fun.

You can almost feel director Francis Lawrence stiffening up as he approaches the finish line, eager to break the tape without falling down in the last mile. The goofiness and the spontaneity are gone, replaced by an official sense of duty. All this mirrors the shift in Katniss’s own psyche, but it plucks a magic arrow from the Hunger Games quiver.

This franchise felt different from the get-go because there was a decidedly analog feel to the mise-en-scene, to the point where it had the same human touch as early Star Trek TV shows. Things felt more handmade than 3D digital, and it somehow matched up with Lawrence’s unaffected screen presence, giving us a millennial fable with a readymade hero.

Mockingjay Part 2 pulls all the pieces together with a final and perfectly competent flourish, but the emotional catharsis feels underplayed and some plotlines just vaporize in the heat of the moment – sacrificed for the larger cause, and swallowed whole to satisfy a hunger that plagues us still.

@katherinemonk

THE EX-PRESS, November 20, 2015

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