THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY - PART 2
Along with a few dozen other, much younger viewers, I caught Wednesday's double-feature of concluding Hunger Games installments, even if my reasons for attending were likely far different from anyone else's. (I really just wanted to lighten my weekend workload and have an excuse to see Philip Seymour Hoffman on the big screen two more times instead of one.) But while I didn't join in my fellow patrons' applause at the close of the awkwardly titled The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2, I was happier with this entry than any since 2012's original, and was glad to have preceded it with Part 1, because it turned out I needed the refresher.
If you're a devoted series fan, you no doubt remember where we left off last November. Katniss Everdeen (eternally well-played by Jennifer Lawrence) and fellow rebels are holed up in a subterranean District 13 compound. President Coin (Julianne Moore) and her advisers (among them Jeffrey Wright's Beetee, Mahershala Ali's Boggs, and the late Hoffman's Plutarch) are executing plans to overthrow the Capitol and its malevolent President Snow (a priceless Donald Sutherland). A film crew is following Katniss, making inspirational PSAs. Her childhood friend Gale (Liam Hemsworth) is still pining for her. Woody Harrelson's Haymitch and Elizabeth Banks' Effie, thankfully, are still nibbling the scenery. And the recently kidnapped and rescued Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) has been effectively brainwashed, and strapped to a gurney to prevent him from tearing out Katniss' throat.
As a modest and begrudging fan, at best, even I remembered all that. What I'd forgotten, and what enhanced my appreciation of Mockingjay as a whole, was how strangely inactive Part 1 is. Barring the bombing of that makeshift hospital and Katniss' lone-arrow retaliation, the exploding dam, and the climactic scene of Zero Dark Thirty suspense, director Francis Lawrence's second sequel (after 2013's Catching Fire) is an awful lot of talk and very little action. Considering I generally like an awful lot of talk, especially when delivered by actors of The Hunger Games' caliber, this wasn't a deal-breaker, and the film was certainly funnier than I recalled. (God bless Banks' Effie "condemned to this life of jumpsuits.") But it still felt, as many of these newly ubiquitous franchise extenders do, like two intermittently pleasurable hours of dutiful foreplay.
By contrast, this outing feels like two hours of climax - and two admirably rich, varied hours after all of its predecessor's preparatory hand-wringing. The Mockingjay saga now feels complete not just because the story and series are finally over, but because Part 2 doesn't feel as lopsided as Part 1, which gave us plenty of dialogue but didn't allow its characters to actually do much. This time, while there are numerous exciting, violent, and nerve-racking set pieces, they're evenly positioned within the tale's telling; the movie isn't merely nonstop action to make up for the previous film's nonstop chatter. It has tension and grandeur and outstanding visual effects, yet tucked amidst them are tiny, beautifully human touches that make its world of Panem one that, in the end, truly seems worth saving.
I don't want to glide over director Lawrence's more thrilling sequences, given that they're probably the most thrilling ones he's ever staged. As Katniss and company walk through abandoned Capitol streets, they have to evade booby-trap "pods" that attack trespassers with fireballs or machine-gun bullets or, in one jaw-dropping instance, a veritable waterfall of crude oil. But while this latter assault is appropriately rousing and scary, it's nothing compared to the nightmare of the rebels waylaid by hissing, toothy monstrosities - "lizard mutts" in Suzanne Collins' Mockingbird novel - that look like slimier versions of H.R. Giger's Alien. As with nearly the entire movie, the lighting here is frustratingly murky. (Earlier, when Michelle Forbes' troop commander entered an already-dark room and barked, "Get these curtains closed!", I may have wept a little.) Nevertheless, it's a terrifying, brilliantly choreographed sequence that blessedly lets Katniss employ her archery skills, and Francis Lawrence demonstrates nearly equal compositional skill in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers-like paranoia of Katniss' and Gale's final siege on the Capitol, with the citizenry pathetically lifting their arms toward the parachuted "gifts" descending.
Yet while I greatly admire the movie's broad strokes, it's the little things I find sticking with me: the words "Mandatory Viewing" televised before our first sight of Stanley Tucci's Caesar Flickerman (words that should always preface Tucci's film arrivals); the delicious perversity of Jena Malone's grin; the gender-reversed-fairytale charm of Peeta waking from his stupor after being kissed by a heroic princess; the wildly satisfying adieus allotted to practically every member of the series' stock company. (Only Tucci and Harrelson don't quite get the send-offs they deserve, though Harrelson and Banks did elicit the loudest, most delighted giggles at my tween-heavy screening when Haymitch and Effie shared a quick peck on the lips - out of the blue, they became the series' potential romantic pairing you didn't even know you wanted.) Plot holes abound, contrivances pile sky-high, Katniss again deserves better than Peeta or Gale ... and Mockingjay - Part 2 still ends its series in style, finding a lovely metaphor for The Hunger Games' combined nine hours when Katniss reveals that, upon waking from nightmares, she calms herself by listing the good deeds that people in her life have done. "It can be a little tedious," she admits, "but there are much worse games to play." There certainly are.
