The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2

When, during a moment in director Francis Lawrence’s newest film, Mockingjay, Part 2, water dripped slowly off a pipe and the camera lingered on a dark corridor, we understood Lawrence was just being a “filmmaker.” When actress Jennifer Lawrence (no relation) looked at the camera with immobile eyes, using the same stoic expression she used in every scene, we knew she was being a thespian. When each line was delivered with William Shatner–like pauses, we realized the script was striving for literature. Nothing wrong with trying for greatness, but this overly dramatic film forgot the fun that made the Hunger Games series great, and that is too bad.

Mockingjay, Part 2, the grand finale of a film series based on a trilogy of young-adult novels (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay), is too long, too bland, and too silly to be a good movie. Jennifer Lawrence, who plays teen warrior Katniss Everdeen, mentally left the series in the second of the four films. The rest of the cast is given little to do in this final installment.

Finale background: The three Hunger Games books tell the story of Katniss, a teenager living in a horrible North American future. An oppressive government funnels the nation’s wealth to the capital city, dire poverty reigns in Appalachia, and children are killed for profit and entertainment. (So much the same as today, only worse.)

President Snow is the Caesar of Panem and keeps the masses in check with broadband and circuses. Some districts of Panem have no bread, but residents may watch the government-sponsored Hunger Games, where child champions from each district fight one another. The winner is a hero and rich for life. The losers are dead.

At their heart, the stories are traditional, with conventional romance and messages that liberty beats government, media manipulate us, and cultural elites can be brats. As a critique of the decadence of the elite and of entertainment culture’s exploitation of children, the Hunger Games should have set off alarm bells in the halls of power. But the books and films got past the gatekeepers thanks to superficial bows to diversity and feminism: a strong interracial cast and a strong female warrior hero.

The dystopian Hunger Games novel was a quick read and great fun. The first film captured that spirit, but just as each book declined in interest and coherence, so does each film. Sadly, there are three books and four films, so the films sink to lower depths.

Mockingjay, Part 2 (rated PG-13) would be a grim movie—the palette is gray, the dialogue dark—were it not so ludicrous. The decadent leaders of the old regime lose a war by having no coherent strategy: The rebels win it by talking about having a strategy. The war is televised by both sides, which might have been interesting commentary on reality versus virtual reality, if the film hadn’t ended up with characters watching television while we watched them watching television.

If teenage angst could be turned into a political platform, the film might have had something serious to say. It could spawn dissertations at the University of Missouri: President Snow is a white man overcome by his interracial opponents. Get it? Snow is white.

This latest Hunger Games installment is a throwback to a day when kids knew how to change the world. It has the misfortune to come to the box office right after young adults in the grip of moral certainty committed mass murder in Paris. There is something disturbing about a film in which a teenager takes upon herself the decision to assassinate her leader and the president of the republic.

“Real or not real?” the two teenage lovers ask each other. The movie is real enough. Its connection to human reality in 2015 is not.