The simple, but incomplete, explanation for this is that, unlike Part 1, things happen in this film. Picking up, roughly, later in the afternoon of the final scene in the last movie, there's not a scrap of recap as we plunge into the grim militaristic bunkers of District 13, where the transparently untrustworthy Alma Coin (Julianne Moore) plots how best to use the increasingly resentful Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) as a propaganda tool. Katniss has other plans - her only real goal in life at this point is to assassinate the unspeakably vile dictator President Snow (Donald Sutherland) - so she endeavors to sneak away to the frontlines where the rebel forces' battle the Capitol loyalists in the streets of the Capitol itself. The furious Coin determines that the best way to turn this to her advantage is to saddle Katniss with an all-star team of rebel heroes, AKA characters we mostly already know and like, along with a film crew that will document the team's staged victories as they tarry safely behind the main fighting. For idiotic reasons, this team includes Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), who has been brainwashed to want to murder Katniss. Obviously, the goal of staying away from the fighting ends in failure, and soon our heroes are dying piecemeal in the face of the elaborate, violent traps the Capitol has left strewn about the city streets.
This still leaves us with the basic problem that we have a movie that's nothing but rising action until it finally starts to engage with the narrative again in the last quarter. At which point it generally salvages the rushed ending of the Mockingjay book, and making the climactic execution feel more stately and thematically intentional. It's a damn pity that the themes being called upon in this scene were all explored in the last movie, but it's obviously the case that we're supposed to think of the two Mockingjays as one big movie; it just happens to be one big movie that's terribly-paced and 90 minutes too long. Still and all, Mockingjay 2 backloads all of its best material, both as a political story and as a work of character drama, so it's possible to leave the film feeling mostly kindly towards it (though it does very much drop the ball on the epilogue, turning it into a poorly-blocked conversation between mother and infant).
Anyway, the thing that really propels this movie above its immediate predecessor is that most of the people we see onscreen are in much better form than they were the last time around: Moore is a conspicuous exception. And it's a damned pity that the story necessarily sidelines most of its best players - Jeffrey Wright, Elizabeth Banks, and Philip Seymour Hoffman (in his final, incomplete performance) all put in what amount to cameos, and Jena Malone hardly fares better - but they're all in good form for the fragments of time we see them. It's great to see Lawrence doing some proper acting again in a Hunger Game, carrying around a shroud of morally outraged fatigue that's miles better than any of the sullen annoyance she conjured up in the repetitive, overly domesticated material that made up the last film. Sutherland is an outright revelation: in all of these films, he's been a perfectly suitable villain, owing largely to his native ability to make everything sound insinuating and sleazy, but here he turns things up to Full Ham, snarling and spitting like a cobra and obviously relishing every moment to portray a thoroughly smug monster of narcissism. Impressively, this doesn't even slightly knock the pins out from under the deeply serious ending.
For that, credit must go to director Francis Lawrence, who like his unrelated star benefits considerably from the opened-up canvas that Mockingjay 2's more action-oriented plot provides. His best skill, demonstrated to considerable effect in I Am Legend and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, is to dig into the psychologically wearying effects of living in a crapped-out world, and the battle-scarred Capitol, designed with maximum ruined gaudiness by Philip Messina, who has stuck by the franchise since the very start, provide a great arena for that impulse . As Mockingjay 2 piles up more and more outrages against Katniss and turns bleaker and bleaker, F. Lawrence and J. Lawrence working together to create a suitable grim portrayal of the strain of continuing because one must, even when the accumulation of trauma is entirely too much to bear. And this, too helps give the final scenes - especially the franchise's key moment of emotional catharsis, involving a cat - weight that I, personally, found nowhere in the book.
All of that being nice and thoughtfully wretched, virtually everything that's worth tackling in Mockingjay 2 happens in the last 30 minutes of the movie. Leading up to that, it's nothing but Mockingjay 1's equally dreary twin: all movement instead of all stasis, no intellectual context instead of so much context you can choke on it. The obvious superiority of the theoretical one-feature version of this story is enough to make one weep, but let us hope and pray that the fan editors will take care of that for us. In the meantime, Mockingjay 2 is just a lot of busy running and screaming and dying courtesy of visual effects that are deeply far removed from anything like the state of the art, with all the characters beyond Katniss and the deeply bland Peeta and Gale (Liam Hemsworth, one of the only significant actors in the anglosphere who can make Hutcherson look charismatic) functioning mostly as an amorphous blob of unhappy humanity. It is, against my expectations, an improvement on the book, but it's still a pretty lumpy and corrupted finale to a franchise that never rose above "pretty darn good", but deserved to end with more dignity and intelligence than this.
6/10
Reviews in this series
The Hunger Games (Ross, 2012)
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (Lawrence, 2013)
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 (Lawrence, 2014)
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (Lawrence, 2015)
You gotta like that they spent, what, 150 million on this movie, and the best part by far is Donald Sutherland laughing.
ReplyDeleteDid you see it in 3d? 3D was terrible. You couldn't see anyone
ReplyDeleteOne of the worst things about these two part adaptations is that so far it's meant making an entire movie out of the third act.
ReplyDeleteKind of weird that this film has anything in common with Pagnol's La Femme du Boulanger, but that was the only thing I could think of when the emotional climax with the cat occurred.
ReplyDeleteI reread the book prior to and immediately following seeing the movie, and it was surprising how closely the movie followed the text while simultaneously hitting the mark more consistently. Part of this, I think, is because the paring-down of dialogue that happens with any book-to-screenplay adaptation helped to remove a good amount of overbaked speech and syntax...something that didn't bother me the first time I read the book but made itself more apparent subsequently. What this sort of says to me is that the events of Mockingjay were on point, and some of the discordance felt by some readers is due to the way events are transcribed, rather than the way the story itself winds down. On the non-dialogue front: The two best changes the movie made involved making Katniss less passive in the movie Part 2 than she even was in the book Part 2 (the "stowaway" plot development in the movie may have been simpler than the book's stages of impromptu military training, but damned if it isn't far cleaner and gives the character a focus she didn't necessarily have in the respective part of the book), and especially by turning the final Capitol siege of the book, which was a massively-scaled but indistinct series of arena traps, into a suicidal beeline for Snow's mansion--it's more grounded, more efficient, a lot more disturbing, and more appropriate.
ReplyDeleteI'm a bit surprised at your assessment of the effects in the final paragraph of your review; granted, there were a couple of shots where the elements appeared a little plastic (especially in that final firefight), but to me the majority of the effects felt like they contained a weight and presence that something like the dinosaurs in Jurassic World mostly lacked.
Still glad to be able to read your review. I've been waiting for this one. I'm doing a single-movie cut of Mockingjay; I've gotten the elements of Part 1 down from 123 minutes to 80, and it'll shrink a bit further once Part 2 is released. I mostly want to see if it can be done effectively with the existing parts, which were written to spread out across two films. I'm in the minority, I think, in believing that a Part 1 and Part 2 for Mockingjay has its assets--and in some ways, make the films markedly more successful than the book--but I'm looking forward to seeing how a single 160-minute cut flows.
I have one persistent question about the story for you, seeing as how I actually believe that Mockingjay is a strong closer to the storyline overall, and I'm in the minority on that: What would have been a better way to resolve the pieces of the story that had been set up in the first and second books? I'm having trouble thinking of any that are indisputably superior. I'm in total agreement with you, however, on how badly Julianne Moore asserted herself in this role. It's a startling series of bad decisions by an actress who's instincts are normally quite good.
Arbitrariest connection ever, but the whole trend of splitting the final installment into a boring time-killer Part 1 followed by an exhausting Part 2 reminds me of Phantasm IV; and how that time we never got to see the spectacular conclusion. Of course it's a little more forgivable at a scale where you can be confident the stalling is out of legitimate necessity to raise funds.
ReplyDeleteThen again, there's something all too majestic about that particular franchise setting up a finale never to be.
Agreed on two key points, Tim : yes, taking a franchise about the evils of mainstream media and forcing it to split its final story in two for commercial gain is especially gauling; yes Julianne Moore is uncharacteristically guarded and weirdly ineffective, brought into harsher sunlight by the bombastic Donald Sutherland. With respect to the final chapter, I really enjoyed it venturing into all out horror movie territory in the second act, while rekindling the child murdering nihilism of the first film, then wrapping everything up in a 70s style mileau of plague-on-all-your-houses disenchantment.
ReplyDeleteI REALLY like this film.
Not quite as much as I love tthe masterful Gary Ross effort but overall this series has been consistently taken for granted when they serve as a solid primer in politics during an era of palpable antiestablishment anger (particularly among younger generations) and so much better than they ever needed to be, given much of the captured audience might have settled for a series that sidelined every half interesting theme for a soapy romance. (Don't give me that look, Tom Hooper!)
And hey, if they're good enoughy for Colbert to use as frequent fodder during the election circus, that's good enough for me to conclude the whole endeavour has been a little more worthwhile than Twilight+.
…And while I too indulge in one too many epilogues, frankly I think that's a hell of a line to go out on. #worsegamestoplay
@Yourself - There actually has been a fifth and final Phantasm movie - Ravager - ready and in the can for a while now (they shot in 2014/2015) and Coscarelli (who didn't direct but produced and wrote) is looking for a distributor. So we will finally get our conclusion to the adventure.
ReplyDeleteOn less happy news, the trailer (which is on YouTube) looks like home video type of blegh and Angus Scrimm just died last night.
>Angus Scrimm just died last night.
ReplyDeleteThat's sad news. But who wouldn't want to make it to 89 years and still be active in the work we enjoy.
Ben- Well that's a tricky question. I'm not sure that the concept of Mockingjay is bad, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired, I think. The first third is one plot point stretched out way too long, and the last third is a joyless march through plot points that feel like she wanted to get to the execution scene, but had run out of creative energy to make the journey at all interesting.
ReplyDelete