The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2 (2015) **½

     When I first saw The Hunger Games and its initial sequel, Catching Fire, it didn’t really matter that I hadn’t read either of the source novels. I probably should have been able to guess, though, that I was running a much bigger risk going into the two Mockingjay movies similarly cold. Viewers who read the book first would understand at the end of Mockingjay, Part 1 exactly where in the narrative the adaptors had left off, and they’d already know the general shape of what was to come in Part 2. I, on the other hand, set myself up for a major interpretive error while watching the first Mockingjay film, and for an equally major disappointment once the second one revealed my mistake. You see, what impressed me most about Mockingjay, Part 1 was its willingness to leave behind the arena-fight concept that had defined the series up to then, but in fact that departure was largely illusory. What was actually happening was that director Francis Lawrence and screenwriters Peter Craig and Danny Strong were holding the return to the arena in reserve for the series finale. At least some of my dissatisfaction with Mockingjay, Part 2 is therefore unjust, as I call upon it to cash checks that Part 1 never intended to write in the first place. On the other hand, this final entry in the original Hunger Games tetralogy (the series has since sprouted a prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes) also let me down fair and square with its needlessly bloated running time, its excessive emphasis on empty-calorie action sequences, and a dilatory conclusion that raises the ante on The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King by trying to spin an entire extra act out of material that would have hit harder as a bleakly ironic epilogue.

     Speaking of bleak irony, President Snow (Donald Sutherland), the supreme dictator of Panem, sure does have a knack for it. Although the extraction team led by Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth) was successful in springing Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), Johanna Mason (Jena Malone), and the rest of Snow’s hostages from captivity in the Capital and spiriting them away to District 13, the rescue came too late to save Peeta from being brainwashed into serving as a sleeper assassin targeting Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence). The good news is that Peeta not only failed in his mission, but also survived his failure. The bad news is that the prognosis for undoing his conditioning is iffy in the extreme. It’s also distinctly sub-optimal for the cause of overthrowing Snow that Peeta hurt Katniss badly enough to put her out of action for the time being, not only as a fighter, but also as the Mockingjay, the revolution’s media figurehead.

     That said, it’s an open question how much Everdeen herself really matters at this point. The Mockingjay has done her job very well indeed, and there isn’t a single district where Snow’s forces aren’t bedeviled by terrorism, sabotage, guerilla fighting, and general disobedience from the formerly passive populace. Even the privileged and hitherto loyal inhabitants of Districts 1 and 2 have become less dependable than they used to be— which is a real problem for the regime, seeing as 1 and 2 are where it gets most of its soldiers. The renewed civil war is far from over, mind you, but the point is that it well and truly is a war now. What’s more, it’s a war that the regime’s decades of heavy-handed oppression have set it up to lose now that the mood has shifted. There just aren’t enough people benefiting from the status quo in any significant way to provide Snow with the human resources he needs to maintain his grip on power.

     The one advantage that Snow undeniably does still have is technological superiority, and as the frontlines draw closer to the Capital, he goes all-in on leveraging it. Whatever techno-magic previously enabled the Gamemakers to manipulate reality in the Hunger Games arenas can be set up wherever there’s a functioning power grid, so the oncoming revolutionary armies will face much stiffer opposition within the city limits than the increasingly outmatched regular soldiery can mount. And really, what high-stakes gamble could be more fitting under the circumstances than to broadcast live video of the rebels being ground up by reality-bending booby traps into all the districts still capable of receiving such transmissions? Even now that the endgame is afoot on the ground, however, District 13 President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore) can’t bring herself to let a single move in the propaganda war go unopposed, so she authorizes another commando infiltration of the Capital ahead of the advance. This team, led by two trusted officers called Boggs (Mahershala Ali, from Predators and Jurassic World: Rebirth) and Paylor (Patina Miller), will counter Snow’s final gambit by filming themselves disabling and dismantling the arena-derived sabotage devices. All concerned take it as just what one would expect from the Mockingjay when Katniss stows away aboard the hoverjet carrying Boggs and Paylor’s commandos, but in fact she has a very different aim from scoring one last propaganda coup for District 13. This time, Katniss is fixing to drop in on the presidential palace to settle her accounts with Snow face to face.

     Mockingjay, Part 2 took me by surprise in all sorts of ways— some of them more welcome than others. As I’ve already indicated, I was most unhappy to see the attack on the Capital devolve into yet a third arena fight after Mockingjay, Part 1 inadvertently convinced me that the series had grown beyond those as an organizing principle. In retrospect, of course, I recognize that that was always where this story was going, but I can still point to my misunderstanding as illustrating the folly inherent in splitting up book adaptations for no better reason than to inflate ticket sales artificially. I also think it’s fair to point out how repetitive this stuff feels now that we’ve seen how well The Hunger Games could get on without it, and how clunky it is to use the big, climax-shaped set piece of the Capital raid as the second act in a film that by rights should be nothing but another movie’s third to begin with.

     The existence of a whole ’nother act after the battle’s end is a more mixed sort of surprise, however. On the one hand, the loss of story momentum, at a time when there’s absolutely no prospect of building it back up again, is crippling. Nor are matters helped by the laborious manner in which the filmmakers tie off the remaining loose ends one by one by one. But at the same time, I concede that my preferred alternative— to compress all the post-conquest material into a tight, punchy, dark-as-fuck epilogue— would leave very little chance for the audience to sit with what a nasty piece of work Alma Coin turns out to be. We’re not quite in “meet the new boss— same as the old boss” territory here, but when Coin goes mask-off, it does lead one to appreciate the honesty and authenticity of an unrepentant viper like Snow.

     As for the straight-up pleasant surprises, they mostly confirm trends that were hinted at in Mockingjay, Part 1, and which I refrained from discussing previously so that I could do so here instead. By far my favorite thing about Mockingjay as a whole is its unbending refusal to make a full-fledged heroine out of Katniss. For all her inspirational value as a figurehead of rebellion, she never really rises above a strictly personal understanding of her fight against the Snow regime. Indeed, so far as she’s concerned, her fight is always specifically against Snow as an individual. He’s the evil bastard whose boot keeps stomping on the faces of people she cares about, and even after Coin’s self-exposure, I’m not sure that Katniss ever consciously grasps that the boot itself is the problem. Similarly, the creators of all these movies have been admirably consistent in portraying Katniss as simply not leadership material. She’s a gadfly par excellence when pushed to it, but she neither desires nor has the temperament to wield any kind of authority. All she wants, in the final assessment, is a quiet, country-girl life with as few attachments and entanglements as possible outside of her own kin. That all feels extremely believable to me, as does Katniss’s inability ever to become a strategic thinker in the same league as Snow, Coin, or even Peeta. Her talent lies in kicking over gameboards, not in playing on them (which is another reason why this movie’s midcourse return to the arena sticks in my craw).

     Another thing I liked about Mockingjay that I wasn’t expecting at all was the end to which it brought the love-triangle subplot concerning Katniss, Peeta, and Gale. I seem to be very much in the minority on this, but it strikes me as perfectly fitting that the determining factor in the contest for Katniss’s heart ultimately has nothing to do with mere romance. When Katniss makes her final, irrevocable choice between the two boys, it’s because one of them does something that she plausibly finds unconscionable during the attack on the Capital, so that she can never look at him the same way afterward. Teen love ends in grownup tragedy, and it does so without the trite expedient of killing off either of the rivals for her affections. Then in what might be the franchise’s starkest touch of realism, one can easily imagine the loser telling himself, looking back, that her reason for cutting him off was naively adolescent instead of steadfast and principled.

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