Katniss Everdeen is done.
Jennifer Lawrence’s trilogy of blockbusters based on the popular Suzanne Collins young-adult novels comes to a conclusion this weekend with the release of the second part of its third installment (oh, Hollywood – you are incorrigible!), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2. Once again helmed by Francis Lawrence, the film marks, feels like, and is a logical and mostly satisfying saga ender, but it also comes off just a tad anticlimactic there at the very end.
No, not because J. Law’s fierce-warrior heroine finally chooses between Josh Hutcherson’s noble, if brainwashed-into-wanting-to-kill-her Peeta Mellark and Liam Hemsworth’s also-noble Gale Hawthorne – something I guess she simply had to do. These crowd-pleasers may have been wonderfully pro-independent, strong women, but they clearly still had to hit certain beats, and, well...there was no getting away from that bit o’ convention. Having having Katniss be quote-unquoted completed by a man, no matter how bland the move (and no matter how bland he was – seriously, it took brainwashing to make Peeta somewhat interesting...and ya still couldn’t make Gale compelling, even after he tacitly confesses his perhaps,not-so-unwitting role in Katniss’ biggest heartbreak?), was inevitable.
The disconnect actually comes from the fact that we’re denied a moment of schadenfreude that we have been anticipating for three movies and three and a half years.
I mean, we knew that Donald Sutherland’s entitledly evil President Snow would fall. I never quite imagined he would fall like that, you see, but it makes sense things played out the way they did in this final film. Danny Strong (TV’s Empire, Lee Daniels’ The Butler) co-wrote The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 and its immediate predecessor, and he is the years-later breakout of TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a wonderfully pro-independent, strong women show by one Joss Whedon, a firm proponent of not giving audiences what they want but what they need. He and co-writer Peter Craig have delivered a script that doesn’t cater to Katniss’ franchise-long motivation but confronts it, making her thing about who her true enemy is and allowing her to be both smart and merciful.
Had the powers that be served up Katniss doing with Snow the way she always thought she wanted to – the way we wanted her to – some of us probably would be comparing the actions of the Mockingjay to those of Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel.
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 does what it needs to, which is to bring Katniss home, back to her beloved District 12 to live the life for which she has had to fight so hard and lost so much. Yes, we see her and her band of allies (including Gale and Peeta and the film crew that Julianne Moore’s coldly calculating rebel President Coin has commissioned to chronicle the Mockingjay’s every rallying movie) infiltrate the Capitol to get to Snow. So we get action and adventure and a few moving moments with the friends she’s made along the way, like Woody Harrelson’s Haymitch Abernathy and Elizabeth Banks’ Effie Trinket.
But we’re on this side of the ride now, and F. Law knows that he needn’t sustain the excitement for yet another money-making chapter of the story. He can bring us home, too. And he does.
My Rating ***
Photo: Classicalite.com.
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