Mockingjay Part 2 Review

Studio Producers have still not realized that splitting finales into two parts does not increase the quality of the movie— but it does increase the money in their pocket! And that’s why they’re going to keep doing it. The finale for The Hunger Games series finally here with a strong... meh!

The trailers made Mockingjay Part 2 look intense and like a strong finale but the movie itself sort of fell flat. Parts were intense but the intensity falls apart by coincidences, plot holes, and characters acting out of character as soon as you started thinking about it.

As soon as Mockingjay started it wasted no time letting the audience know that it would be making Gale into a war hungry butt-face. The book made this same choice but no one I know is a fan of that choice so translating it so faithfully to the screen was not the best choice. It makes me question if the rebels are letting this war get to them or not and if some of them truly had the right intentions. And I feel that was the effect Mockingjay was going for but it didn’t go all the way with it, if it wanted to go all the way with the ‘the rebels are becoming so obsessed with defeating the Capital that they become as bad as the Capital’ idea then at the end the rebels should have set up a new hunger games with the Capital’s children— that would really make things go full circle. But of course no film with twelve year olds as its main audience is going to go that dark.

Now I let some conveniences go in the earlier movies because they still kind of made since within the guidelines the world had set up, but in Mockingjay the more you think about scenes, the more they fall apart. There is one scene in particular that is very similar to the acid fog scene from Catching Fire in that what they were running from just stops at a convenient time. In Catching Fire one could argue that the fog stopped because they reached the next clock zone, but that same rule does not apply in Mockingjay, The only reason the thing stopped was because the story couldn’t have the main characters die. (And for people who know what part I’m talking about, how did that thing even work? The more I thought about it the less sense it made). There were other parts where if characters would have just stepped right instead of left things could’ve been avoided or if Katniss would’ve used her arrows to help a certain character HE TOTALLY COULD HAVE MADE IT UP THAT LADDER AND DIDN’T HAVE TO DIE… (I’m sorry that just really bothered me, I know it was in the book but if the way you are adapting it to the screen makes that death no longer make sense, then don’t kill that character).

In the end, I know it sounds like I hated this move but I actually didn’t. Jennifer Lawrence was great, as usual, as were all the other actors, and the directing was good but nothing eye catching. Overall, my main problems were with the story and characters, everything else was just very average. Mockingjay Part 2 is a movie that is okay for now but I cannot see myself rewatching again, even if I’m marathoning all the Hunger Games movies.

Keep Watching…

Meagan!