Review: ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2’ Is Stylish But Stricken By Its Inability To Let Go

What made last year’s The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 so unsatisfying was its sense of being purely a curtain raiser for this, the main event. And since then, the hype has only been building. “Nothing can prepare you for the end,” goes the tagline. Well, Lionsgate has had a red-hot go.

The fourth and final instalment hits cinemas today and it’s instantly much more exciting, because Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) gets to be an urban guerrilla in a bombed, booby-trapped Capitol, rather than a speechifying figurehead. At last, the series finds its way back to the ethic of mayhem, co-operation and self-sacrifice that animated the 2012 original.

But Katniss’s personal mission to assassinate Panem’s despotic President Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland) is at cross-purposes with the anodyne propaganda role she’s been locked into by District 13 leader Alma Coin (Julianne Moore) and ex-Gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Her attempts to slip away quietly are foiled by the constant presence of her film crew, led by director Cressida (Natalie Dormer). No matter how strenuously Katniss tries to evade it, she is the Mockingjay – a face so recognisable a child can pick her in a crowd.

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It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye

The Hunger Games film series deserves its popularity. It’s one of the most emotionally and politically resonant YA franchises of recent years, especially with Lawrence’s magnetic acting at its centre. Even at its worst – Mockingjay Part 1 – it offered a level of metacommentary that escapes its many imitators, as Katniss begins to realise spectacle is inherently fascistic, no matter who’s responsible. It’s a moral act for Katniss to turn away in disgust as rebels cheer the avalanche they’ve sparked to bury a key enemy stronghold.

As readers of the novel will know – and this is definitely a film for pre-existing Hunger Games fans – the series’ emotional culmination is Katniss’s refusal of any victory won ruthlessly by ‘whatever it takes’. As she tells her increasingly radicalised love interest Gale (Liam Hemsworth), her experiences in the Games have taught her that every death matters.

This film has a sombre, elegiac tone, focusing on human trauma rather than impersonal spectacle. Even amid the joy of Finnick Odair’s (Sam Claflin) wedding to his sweetheart Annie Cresta (Stef Dawson), Katniss broods, and is taunted by the acid-tongued, opiate-addicted tribute Johanna Mason (an excellent Jena Malone). The camera twirls around Katniss and her sister Prim (Willow Shields), embracing as if for the last time.

Let’s talk about Philip Seymour Hoffman. He gets moments of brilliance – one slow, knowing smile especially stands out – but at 137 minutes, Mockingjay Part 2 feels stretched over his absence like one of those taiko drums in the Capitol’s public rituals. Although most of his scenes had been shot before his death, there’s a bit of noticeable digital trickery, and a letter from Plutarch read out to Katniss by her mentor Haymitch (Woody Harrelson). I can see how Hoffman might have made it work as dialogue, but here it has the unfortunate ring of Poochie’s return to his home planet.

It’s emblematic of a wider problem: Mockingjay Part 2 suffers from the same unwillingness to let go that has plagued long-running franchises including Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean and The Lord of the Rings, and even marred the recent The Martian. Surrendering to the temptation of an over-extended epilogue, director Francis Lawrence allows all the accumulated narrative tension to evaporate.

This is done out of fidelity to the book, of course. But where books can use language economically and elliptically, leaving readers to infer a broad span of events, films are trapped in the language of visual and verbal representation. So, the book’s bittersweet ending – which highlighted Katniss’s ongoing struggle to replace state-inflicted trauma with memories of personal kindness – becomes cosier here, and more sedate.

The love triangle between Katniss, Gale and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) has never been very compelling on film. There’s a kind of cringey scene here in which, holed up in a safe house, the two men share a quiet R Kelly and Usher moment while an eavesdropping Katniss pretends she’s asleep.

Gale’s comforting ability to understand Katniss without words was what made their relationship special, but his character has suffered from the transition to film. The Dressmaker showed Hemsworth could be warm and charming, but he isn’t half the actor Lawrence is. He has just never been that interesting in The Hunger Games.

Hutcherson more successfully conveyed Peeta’s easy, earnest sweetness. Now, affectingly, the Capitol has tortured it out of him. Peeta’s alternate rage and whingeing shocks Katniss, and helping him through his dissociation makes her realise that human goodness is all that’s real.

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A Final Twirl On The Catwalk

The Hunger Games has always used costume to delineate haves and have-nots, because we already think of couture as an indulgence for the frivolous super-wealthy. The colourful Capitol is meant to seem grotesquely decadent to Katniss, whose well-worn clothes reference Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era documentary photographs. And in Mockingjay Part 2 there’s a crowd scene of Capitol refugees who, hilariously, look like New Romantic Blitz Kids.

I really admired costume designers Kurt and Bart’s previous, allegorically rich use of colour, fabric and silhouette in Park Chan-wook’s Stoker (2013). Having created the utilitarian grey jumpsuits of District 13 in Mockingjay Part 1, they get the chance here to be more expressionistic. They put Katniss not just in the black and grey of her Mockingjay suit or District 13 military uniform (I would totally wear the rebels’ Henley undershirts with asymmetrical darker trim), but also in inky blues and turquoises – a darker echo of the blue dress in which she volunteered as tribute.

The film’s use of Asian-influenced drapery is also striking, whether in structured Capitol tailoring or the layered grey textures of rebel commanders Paylor (Patina Miller) and Lyme (Gwendoline Christie). (An aside: Mockingjay Part 2 finally discovers something the formidable Gwendoline Christie can’t do — an American accent. Oh dear, hers is not good.)

But the film also deploys different varieties of uniformed futurism to show that Snow’s and Coin’s ambitions are essentially interchangeable. Both leaders wear structured suits. But while Snow’s dark-coloured, Victorian-influenced brocade smoking jackets suggest the decay of his reign, Coin’s unsettling wig and vampiric silver contact lenses match her modern, minimalist Mao-style grey suits, which range in shade from warlike iron and steel to an ironically tranquil dove-grey.

This franchise’s central irony has been that it invites its audiences to enjoy a spectacle that it insists is socially and morally corrosive. This isn’t the triumphant final flourish that it really deserves; but then it militates against triumphalism, and towards something quieter and more mournful. However, in remaining slavishly faithful to its source novel, Mockingjay Part 2 comes across as weary and dragging, ensuring that only loyal fans will really be satisfied.

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The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 is out now.

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Mel Campbell is a freelance journalist and cultural critic. She blogs on style, history and culture at Footpath Zeitgeist and tweets at@incrediblemelk.