The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 (2015)

** ½ out of ****

I can sum up my feelings about “Mockingjay Part 2” with one sentence: it tries to be too many things to be really good at any one of them. It's an action movie, a political drama, an ideological soapbox, a sci-fi flick.... there are just too many directions happening. Whereas I loved the first Mockingjay movie, I found that this one doesn't have quite the same impact, visually or emotionally.

When we left Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) she had just barely survived a reunion with her betrothed, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), who tried to lay a Boston Strangler on her. He's been reprogrammed by the Capital to believe Katniss is the root of all evil and to kill her at any cost. Meanwhile the revolution goes on as the districts rebel against the oppression of the Capital. The “president” of the revolutionary forces, President Coyne (Julianne Moore), has decided that Katniss is much too valuable as a figurehead to risk in the war, and won't send her to the front lines for the final stages of the battle.  Katniss of course resents this, as she should.  She's not only been the ignitor and leader of the revolution, she's also been its most effective fighter.

The problem now is that Katniss, in her mind at least, has left the revolution behind.  Now she is obsessed with only one thing – killing President Snow (Donald Sutherland). Her rage over what he's done to Peeta (as well as the oppression of the last hundred years or so) has her single minded, and eventually she takes charge of her PR-based army unit and leads them to the Capital to try to accomplish that assassination. Unfortunately, the Capital has made it nearly impossible to reach with a complex layer of booby traps throughout the outskirts, which Katniss and crew must navigate.

Meanwhile, Katniss is also becoming suspicious of Coyne, whose philosophies seems to be becoming more dictatorial than democratic. But Coyne still seems the better alternative than Snow, who continues to be utterly ruthless in what he will do to protect the Capital's position. The politics of this film are more layered than the previous films, and I believe necessarily so,, but it just adds another level of intrigue to confuse the movie's younger audiences. In the last reel Katniss does something pretty extreme (though it was pretty obvious what she was going to do).  This action made good sense to me but had my 11 year old flipping out yelling “What did you do!?!?!”

As a movie, it's a pretty good watch and a fairly nice conclusion to the film series. It also pretty closely follows the novels, which was also the case in the previous films. But personally, I found that this one was a real let-down after its predecessor, which was able to much better connect the viewer emotionally to the characters and their cause. This one departed from that connection, as the cause became a lot more convoluted and the action overtook the emotion.

I'd recommend it, and suggest it wraps things up fairly nicely. I simply found it a letdown after “Mockingjay Part 1” was so very good.