Stretching every square second out of this story to turn what should have been one movie into two, Mockingjay Part Two has finally been released into theaters like a sickly wild animal that slowly walks out of its cage on trembling legs while you just sit there thinking, goodness, will you just run already? I got stuff I gotta do!
Just in case you’ve been living under a rock in a cave on Mars with your fingers in your ear, Mockingjay (Part freaking two) is the final chapter of The Hunger Games saga, the interesting yet mostly underwhelming story of Katniss Everdeen and her rise as a contestant on the world’s worst reality game show to a revolutionary warrior, overthrowing the producer of the world’s worst reality game show.
Splitting this story into two movies killed it. The split wasn’t done because it serviced the story or because the story was too big to be contained in one movie, it was done to make more money. That’s it. What’s worse was that not only was the split unnecessary, it actually hurt the story in the long run. Both Mockingjay movies are drawn out by unnecessarily prolonged sequences of dreary dialogue to pad out the run time and, when it comes time to actually have action, most of it takes place in darkened tunnels and is shot so badly that the viewers don’t have the slightest damn idea what’s going on.
Greed has taken what was a novel and somewhat appealing idea and made it laborious to sit through. Seriously, a pox on the people who split movies in two in the name of maximizing profits and may their eyebrows turn into diarrhea-spewing caterpillars.
Even the movie is ugly. Everything is gray punctuated by shades of darker gray. There is so little joy and fun to be had in its entire run that I would almost call Mockingjay Part 2 an exercise in catching depression on film.
I give Jennifer Lawrence her dues to committing to the role of Katniss as she did. Truthfully, she was the one bright shining light in mess, but it’s still a mess and the tragic part was, it didn’t have to be. I have my doubts that a unified and shorter Mockingjay movie would have been a great film, but it might have been a good one and now, we’ll never know.
A lot like The Hunger Games, the only real winners aren’t the participants or the spectators, it’s the jerks in the ivory tower counting their ill-gotten gains.
Jason Gaston 