If it worked for “Harry Potter” and “Twilight,” it was inevitable that Hollywood would stretch the final installment of author Suzanne Collin’s wildly successful dystopian “Hunger Games” trilogy into two films. Opening this week is “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1” with “Part 2” due for release next year.
But what made the first two films — “The Hunger Games” and “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” — so kinetic and dynamic seems to have slowed to a stall in the stretched out “Mockingjay.”
This time the girl on fire Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), after literally shattering the games forever in the incendiary finale of “Catching Fire,” has been rescued and awakens in District 13, a secret underground bunker of rebels led by the stoic President Coin (Julianne Moore in her first “Hunger Games” appearance). After rising from slave to hero with skill and determination during the heart-stopping gladiator events of the last two films, Katniss is now the mobilizing symbol of rebellion.
It’s a fact that the resistance — with a brain trust that includes strategist Plutarch (Philip Seymour Hoffman), computer hacker Beetee (Jeffrey Wright), a clean and sober Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) and Effie Trinket (no longer wigged out but a fatigues wearing Elizabeth Banks) — knows only too well. They propel a reluctant Katniss into a series of propaganda videos and on-camera visits to the war-torn frontline of Panem as it is being systematically decimated by the Capitol, led by the snide President Snow (Donald Sutherland).
Snow has hatched his own plans, kidnapping Peeta (Josh Henderson) and brainwashing him to denounce Katniss and urge for a cease-fire while the masses huddle around the TV screens that permeate everywhere. The betrayal devastates Katniss who continually wrestles with her emotions not only toward Peeta, but the devastation she unwittingly creates as many are massacred as they defy the Capitol to support her.
The political messages are even more overt in this installment with themes of suppression, media manipulation and ground-level rebellion barely disguised in this futuristic fable. (Interestingly, the film itself is apparently inciting rebellion with five Thai University students arrested this week for flashing the franchise’s signature three-finger salute at the country’s Prime Minister. A theater chain there pulled its release.)
Inciting real rebellion may not have been the producers’ intent, but on a shear entertainment level the first two films were an adrenaline rush of outdoor kill-or-be-killed competition, and addictive excess. (Gone are the powdered wigs and heavy make-up.) “Mockingjay” seems stifled in comparison, set mostly in a claustrophobic, grim and colorless bunker.
Even Katniss seems sidelined here. She barely raises her arrow as she is dressed as a Joan of Arc-style figure, awkwardly filming scripted political messages. She seems far more pawn than feisty victor in this film. Even a daring rescue in the last scenes of the movie (a mere halfway point in the book), she is not participant but merely watches on a screen as the event unfolds. This is just a drawn-out precursor to what awaits in the finale, but we’ll have to wait an entire year to see that.
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