Victim of another money-grabbing, last-volume bifurcation, the penultimate episode of The Hunger Games suffered from not having a proper ending. You couldn't say that about (deep breath) The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2. I counted at least four. There may have been another two or three, but it was too murky to tell for sure.
It seems unlikely that there has ever been a mainstream blockbuster that has been quite so conspicuously under-lit. At times, Jo Willems’s camera allows only the odd nostril and cheekbone to pierce the pervading gloom. This is to a tonal purpose.
Beginning with Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), Katniss Everdeen’s closest chum, recovering from a fit of brainwashing, the film is mostly taken up with the heroine leading a team through hostile territory in an attempt to assassinate the sickly President Snow (Donald Sutherland).
As the revolution gathers momentum, we begin to suspect that, rather than enjoying a new dawn, the citizens of Panem are caught in a repetitive cycle of oppression. They look “from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.” You know how it goes.
The murk also helps to obscure some of the violence and secure the picture an essential 12A certificate. The closing part of the cycle is at its best during a grimy subterranean struggle that leads the band into a nest of sightless troglodytes. During that nicely handled first-person shooter mayhem, it is easy to distract oneself from the unavoidable conclusion that the series is wheezing to make it over the line.
The Hunger Games began as an exciting thriller with a beautifully neat (if not particularly original) high concept: youths fight to the death for the entertainment of their cruel masters. Okay, the flamboyant design suggested a film already preparing for its own cosplay convention, but the striking Jennifer Lawrence – Everdeen forever – gave it savage energy.
As the story has progressed, it has became increasingly bound up with convoluted investigations of peripheral politics. There may be something here about the subversion of the Arab Spring. Lessons can be gleaned concerning the irrepressible primeval aggression of mankind. None of that compensates for the fact that the series’ original juices have dried up.
Oh, well. At least we will no longer have to remember how to punctuate The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2.
