Movie Review: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2 (2015)

Despite the second film in the series sucking out all positive feelings I had for this franchise, the third one somewhat re-energized me. I was on board. I was interested to see Katniss Everdeen back, and to see whatever footage they had of Philip Seymour Hoffman before he died in such an untimely manner.

Admittedly, I wasn’t quite sure where the story would go. Sure, the good guys have to confront the bad guys and President Snow and all that, but I wasn’t sure how it would all go down.

Unfortunately, as expected, there isn’t a lot of plot here, making the 137-minute runtime pretty intimidating. That’s what happens when you take one single book and try and make multiple movies out of it.

And despite the story in the previous film, Katniss largely reacts to things around her. I was hoping to see her more in control, because that was the whole point of the last movie, I thought. She wasn’t inspiring when she was being told what to do. She was inspiring when she was free to decide what to do.

This comes back at the end, of course, but it makes the first half of the movie feel a bit pointless.

For the first time in the series, Lawrence’s performance doesn’t really stand out. I’m not willing to call it bad, but she just seems somewhat disengaged. The supporting cast is pretty good, with Josh Hutcherson probably giving his best performance in the series.

Unfortunately, the Katniss-Peeta relationship continues to be one of the weakest points of the series. It’s just really not a convincing relationship. The movies keep insisting that they have a connection, but four movies in, I haven’t seen it.

It’s definitely not a bad movie. It has some nice moments, and the ending is admittedly quite unexpected, and an appropriate followup to the last film. But it still fails to impress me overall.

Rating: 5/10