The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2

“The Hunger Games” has always been heads and tails the best of the 'teen dystopia" fad, almost by default. The first entries in the franchise managed to mix the corny self-centeredness of the genre with a visually compelling world, entertaining side characters and an overarching story that played to larger themes. There was real, natural progression from the playful dark fantasy of the first film to the grim and awful reality in the third.

Instead of combining the two in a blockbuster conclusion to the story, “Mockingjay — Part 2" goes nowhere fast. It's a dull movie that brings the series to a dissatisfying conclusion.

It picks up right where the first half left off, with Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) reunited with love-interest and friend Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), who was kidnapped by the evil Capitol and brainwashed for the entirety of the third movie. Now he wants to kill her. Erstwhile Gale (Liam Hemsworth), Katniss's other love interest, still vies for her affections while becoming more and more engaged in a war Katniss doesn't want.

That war, waged around the three of them, is between District 13, led by Coin (Julianne Moore), and the Capitol, led by the amazingly melodramatic Snow (Donald Sutherland). District 13 is leading the uprising of 12 slave districts once forced to participate in Snow's barbaric Hunger Games, which involved the annual murder-tainment of two children from each district. Thanks to her success in the games, Katniss has become an effective propaganda tool for District 13. She is “The Mockingjay.”

"Mockingjay — Part One" was all filler, no killer, which worked out much better than it should have. It was a massive shift in tone that also allowed Katniss, Peeta, Gale and the world of Panem to develop in new directions. “Mockingjay — Part Two” does nothing to develop them further. A large portion of the movie is characters stating and restating how they feel and the role they're playing in the story. The shallowness and repetition becomes grating.

Given that this is the second half of the finale, it should have been all killer; instead, it's mostly filler, a checklist movie made up of scenes from the book that don't cohere into anything propulsive or engaging. The most impactful and interesting parts of the movie feel diluted by a lot of unnecessary production. It is two hours long by obligation rather than necessity.

The missed opportunities in “Mockingjay” sing louder than the movie itself. The middle act involves Katniss and her team of rebels infiltrating the booby-trapped Capitol, engaging in a kind of urban Hunger Games. It puts the characters out of their element; it should feel like the ultimate iteration of the Games concept and how it relates to our modern wars. Somehow it ends up feeling perfunctory and overly drawn-out. It wastes the metaphor as well as its potential. None of the traps are as clever or cruel as the traps in the other Games, and a few of them are downright disorienting in design.

Katniss has always been a girl out of her element. But "Mockingjay — Part 2" has to provide conclusions for both her and Panem. It does so by jettisoning most of the world-building done across the first three movies and putting a hard focus on Katniss's journey. What set the world of Panem apart were all of the characters who made it feel full of life. Without giving Haymitch (Woody Harrelson), Effie (Elizabeth Banks), or any of the other characters much to do, the movie feels hollow. Most of the supporting characters who get to fight alongside Katniss exist only to die. The movie becomes a numbing parade of dark, sad endings with little weight.

A lot of criticism of “Mockingjay” is how one book was split into two separate films. The complaint is legitimate. Teen YA series in the modern permutation are comprised of stories that are essentially thin, easy to read, emotionally resonant. They're similar to comics or mystery novels or sitcoms; entertainment options that only take about 90 minutes to read. Splitting a 90-minute book into a four-hour movie is a real challenge. In this case the result is tedious.

The utter hopelessness of "Mockingjay — Part 2" and the story of Katniss isn't necessarily wrong; it reflects real life and war. It just feels so much lesser than what the first three films tackled. Bringing in the weight was a necessary and interesting step for the series in "Part One," which was largely about the propaganda war. But "Mockingjay — Part 2" leaves out most of what made "Pt.1" feel interesting, settling on just darkness and violence.

Humans and our media have an war fetish. It underlies all our states, all our interactions, all our inequalities. The pageantry, the elegance in this series was always as snide as it was gorgeous. Hell, all that merchandise they sold? We got to be part of the joke. What"Mockingjay — Part 2" forgets is that part of that fetish includes depictions of war as "realistic," difficult and grim. It isn't clever to show characters we love dying horrible deaths; we go to war films, or watch "The Walking Dead" and "Game of Thrones," to see that all the time. Audiences like to see how horrible we can be when we intend to be, so that we don't have to think about how horrible we are when we don't. Stripping away any black comedy from the process, the slogging "Mockingjay — Part 2" ends the series on a bizarre note.

"Mockingjay — Part 2" neither stands alone as a particularly well-crafted movie nor adds anything to the series as a whole. Pretend the series ended with the first, second or third.