The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2 (2015)

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2 is the final movie adaptation from The Hunger Games series. Originally written by Suzanne Collins, she contributed to the movie adaptation.

The revolution is in full swing. Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is holed up in District 13, with many rebel forces, led by President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore). The fight is going well, and they expect to be invading the capital within a few days. The movie starts with Katniss in the hospital, recovering after being injured when her team snuck in to rescue Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) from the clutches of President Snow (Donald Sutherland). President Snow had brainwashed Peeta into believing that Katniss and the people she represents are a danger to the entire country of Panem. President Snow manipulated Peeta into believing that the rebellion was there to destroy everything that the country represents, using Peeta as a pawn to turn popular opinion against the rebellion. Peeta, though recovered, still believes it all, and would kill Katniss if ever given the chance.

Katniss realizes that the only way to stop the fighting is to kill President Snow, but President Coin refuses to put her directly in harm’s way. Instead, she creates a small ‘strike force’, made up of former Hunger Games winners and specialists. They will be deployed behind the front lines, but pretending to be leading a part of the attacking forces. Her team, lead by Captain Boggs (Mahershala Ali) and Lieutenant Jackson (Michelle Forbes), are given a special device that knows of and can scan for all the booby traps that lie in the capital, so that they can be recorded avoiding them, for propaganda purposes. Katniss is definitely a ‘hero of the people’ and needs to be elevated as such. Coin sends Peeta up to go with the group, thinking he’s been deprogrammed enough to be an asset.

The fight goes on, and concludes. Most of the strike force is killed off, though a set of Rube-Goldbergian traps that have been set. The military tactics that the Panem forces use are terrible, and would never be used by a winning army. There is some gross stupidity on display that is probably glossed over for the sake of the story, so they could get to the end. There were several moments where the outcome was telegraphed, but I’ll leave those for you to discover.

This movie drags in several spots. The runtime is 2 hours, 17 minutes. Between the first and second parts, there was perhaps three+ hours of material that was stretched much further than it should have been, but perhaps the film studio only saw dollar signs. There are several ‘endings’, much along the lines the Lord of the Rings endings, but perhaps that was the point. Keep making a movie until they felt it was enough to pad, and then end. I don’t so much find fault with the end as much as I do with the time it took to get there.

Recommended, but for die-hard Hunger Games fans only.

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