You can never escape The Hunger Games.
It’s war in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2, and the movie feels the weight of taking the battle to the Capitol in every minute of its 137 minute runtime. The story picks up immediately after the conclusion of Part 1 and doesn’t waste much time with catching any newcomers up. While Mockingjay, Part 1 explored the use of war propaganda and the politics around a rebellion, this is a full-on war movie. Part 2 feels burdened by its need to give gravity to that content, and though it is a solid film, it’s also the most flawed in the series.
The story is pretty straightforward: Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is ready to take down the Capitol by killing its leader President Snow (Donald Sutherland), and she will do it by any means necessary. Snow’s torture of Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) that muddied his memories and turned Katniss into a trigger is the latest and greatest burden on our heroine’s shoulders, and highlights her need to do something. Katniss has reminded audiences again and again that she is not a leader, and with Part 1 already having dealt with her difficulty wrapping her mind around being the symbol at the heart of President Coin’s (Julianne Moore) war propaganda, she very quickly decides to not play for the team and instead be the one to kill Snow. She heads to the front lines against Coin’s wishes, but quickly gets swept back up into the political scheming of District 13’s leader.
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Snow, meanwhile, knows that the Districts rebelling against the Capitol means the end of his time in command. Ever since Katniss won the first Hunger Games the fight has been personal between these two, and so he sets out to make the taking of the Capitol a painful one, specifically for the Mockingjay. He uses the Capitol’s gamemakers to set traps through the city and essentially turn it into the “76th Hunger Games,” as Finnick (Sam Claflin) puts it.
Katniss and her squad — Finnick, Gale (Liam Hemsworth), Pollux (Elden Henson), Castor (Wes Chatham), Boggs (Mahershala Ali), Cressida (Natalie Dormer), Jackson (Michelle Forbes) and the Leeg sisters (Kim and Misty Ormiston) — navigate through the dangers of the city for the bulk of the movie, and in some moments Mockingjay, Part 2 delves into horror film territory as zombie-like muttations are released down dark, water-logged tunnels.
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The most thrilling scenes of the movie are when Katniss and company need to evade these traps, so it makes sense that director Francis Lawrence would want to hearken back to the successful structure of The Hunger Games and Catching Fire through these sequences. But so much time is spent on Katniss’s journey to get to Snow that a bait-and-switch moment at the end lacks the punch it needs. Even the twist at the end, which pushes through the movie’s message that the world is changed and hardened by war, is so telegraphed as to not be especially surprising.
When it was announced that the final novel in The Hunger Games series would be split in two films, many were concerned that holding the action-heavy finale for Mockingjay, Part 2 would make Part 1 the weakest of the series. But while that movie managed to elevate its source material and translate difficult concepts about war into an accessible story, Part 2 was so grounded in its need to respect the burden on Katniss’s shoulders that it comes across as too somber and heavy.
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Mockingjay, Part 2 leans heavily on Jennifer Lawrence, and her performance delivers. Like Katniss is the heart of the rebellion, Lawrence is at the center of these movies, and without her impressive performance it wouldn’t work. Even in some of the weaker moments of the film, she is a standout. Her blank face lets us know just how much this four-movie journey has worn down Katniss, and she punctuates that by showing how close Katniss is to the edge in the few moments where she emotionally lashes out.
Many of the other actors get sidelined as the story becomes centered in on Katniss and her quest to kill Snow, with Sutherland, Moore, Hutcherson and Hemsworth providing much of the supporting performances. Characters like Finnick, Johanna, Effie and Haymitch have significantly reduced roles from the previous installments, while people like Gwendoline Christie’s new character Commander Lyme and Stanley Tucci’s Caesar Flickerman only get one scene a piece. It’s worth noting that this movie is Philip Seymour Hoffman’s last film to be released following his death in 2014. There are a few moments where it’s clear that his character Plutarch Heavensbee was supposed to be present, but Mockingjay, Part 2 does a good job of recovering from his absence and finding new ways to keep them in the movie.
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Due to its narrow focus on Katniss and Snow, Mockingjay, Part 2 misses the opportunity to land some of its more emotional and resonant scenes. There’s a major death that comes late in the movie that we later learn has disturbing roots, but both moments fall flat. Even when Katniss has a moment later to react to them, they lack the emotional heft that they deserve. Similarly ill-executed is the movie’s insistence on reminding the audience that there is a love triangle. Gale repeatedly brings up the fact that Katniss will have to choose between him and Peeta, which feels out of place in what is otherwise a war movie.
There is little joy in Mockingjay, Part 2, even as some of its main characters get their “happy” endings. Though the final scene of the film stays true to Suzanne Collins’ source material, it feels out of place. It feels like screenwriters Danny Strong and Peter Craig would have taken the story to another conclusion if they hadn’t been chained to the adaptation, and the same thing can be said for the love triangle. This movie breaks free from its young adult trappings and is very much a film for adults, and it might have been the better for it if it went all the way.
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This is a dark movie, both in terms of its story and its color palate. Sometimes a scene is filmed so dark that you can’t tell where the action is taking place or even which character is dying. Katniss might not be narrating the story, but Lawrence certainly shows us how she sees the world. Every death — and there are many — falls heavy upon her, and Mockingjay, Part 2 succeeds in showing how war can affect its soldiers. There are no victors even if one side wins, and Katniss’s empathy for the fates of both sides is her greatest strength as a character. It’s why some of the happier moments later in the movie don’t land the way they should. They seem to go against what the film otherwise was trying to depict.
Mockingjay, Part 2 gets solid performances from its impressive cast, but feels too burdened by the gravity of its story. The film focuses on Katniss as a way to depict the horrors and damages those living through a war suffer. Because of the focus on the darkness, some of the emotional scenes that aren’t hinged around grief feel out of place. The story plays relatively straightforward, offering up a relatively satisfying conclusion to The Hunger Games that never inspires the same wonder as its more engaging predecessors.
