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User Reviews for: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2

Lainfan
CONTAINS SPOILERS8/10  9 years ago
May the spoiler be always in your favour (this review contains spoilers.)

A great ending has come to the legendary hunger games series. A most welcome ending because we now finally will discover how the creators handled the death of Prim and the bittersweet ending of the book. Those were the two parts of this film I was curious about the most. My judgement is a 50/50 split between praise and expected disappointment.

After 3 movies and covering 2,5 book we have arrived at the endgame. The rebellion is on the capitols doorstep, and the climax of the story has arrived. During this build up there was a decent lack of focus on Katniss her sister Prim (as I mentioned in an earlier hunger games review too.) The importance Prim has to Katniss is shown a few times, but she did not get the appropriate attention for the average watcher to accept and understand that. Therefore the 'big explosion' didn't hit me as hard as it should have (and it didn't look like it hit many of the rest of the audience in the cinema.) But this was an expected point of criticism, and the actual execution of the big scene was done fairly well and a visual treat.
They did left the ending completely intact, with the harsh reality of a post traumatic stress syndrome after a war and poking around in someone's brain. It is an emotionally, nerve-racking but realistic ending, and I loved the books for it. I am thankful the writers had the gut to not change it.

Performance

Performances are once again fabulous. Effie (Elizabeth Banks) her role was mostly played out, so we sadly didn't get to see much of her. Neither did we of Haymitch (Woody Harrelson.) But it wouldn't be the Hunger Games without some of the chart emotional outburst by Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence.) She proves to the world that her fellow generation actresses are miles away from her level of performance. I even dare to say she is the best we've got currently have in all of Hollywood.
Donald Sutherland finally steps it up as president Snow and leaves the franchise with a great final act, giving the evil sceptre to the ever anticipating Coin (Julianne Moore) whome I have yet to see doing a weak performance. Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) and Gale (Liam Hemsworth) are just as great as they always were, even though we do not see enough of Gale to give his character a proper development. They just managed to do enough. Jena Malone as Johanna Mason was a delight, even though fairly irrelevant. The acts of Natalie Dromer as Cressida and the rest of the camera crew & squat underwent the same faith: Fairly irrelevant, but decent nonetheless. Most of the soldiers deaths were less shocking due to their lack of screen time, but there simply isn't enough time to set there character up in this stage of the story, so it couldn't be handled any other way.

Story

The story couldn't have been more relevant to current times. With a massive overlap with the refugees in Europe, the war in Syria and the political pre-election games in the USA, the accidental timing of the movie is perfect. Sometimes it felt like I was watching a speech they took right out of Donald Trump his program, used images from actual war zones and this made it frighteningly applicable to reality for me. The whole story is a fair warning to the current world situation, and one that shouldn't be taken lightly.
Having said that, the script did drop some stitches. Especially with the pacing. The middle part of the movie is going from one event to another lacking some proper motivation besides getting to the end of the movie. It did deepen the drama and gave room for great action scenes, but they had to sacrifice the strategic coherence we saw in the last film. It results in an ending that became fairly predictable, and a feeling that some (major) events were rushed (a weird feeling when you have over 9 hours of film in total.) Using shots during the execution scene, where Snow and Coin are in the same line of sight on multiple occasions, could have been handled differently too. I guess only a few people were surprised by the arrow's direction.

Visual & Music

I can be brief about this, it was phenomenal. The music was a tad less interesting than in the former movies, but still greatly timed and chosen. CGI and SFX was stunning. I was never a big fan of the the underground part, but the mutts were done amazingly well with so much detail and wrath it rightuously felt absolutely threatening. As they truely are one of the capitols most deadly weapons. Even though I knew something would happen in seconds, I still jumped by surprise a few times.

Overall

After all it is a movie with many perks and some tiny flaws that are very understandable. A worthy ending to one of the most important series of its genre.
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