So after the disaster that was Mockingjay – Part 1, the fans pushed and director Francis Lawrence came through and made a more hardcore Hunger Games finale. And as the band Linkin Park had said: “in the end, it doesn’t even matter.”
 

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 is the concluding chapter to the phenomenon that is the Hunger Games saga. The movie picks up after the first part, and Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is finally ready to take the fight to the Capitol. With the aid of numerous districts at her beck-and-call, Everdeen makes a final march to dethrone the aristocratic Capitol and its leader, President Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland). The series, however, is treading on thin ice. The movie before this, Mockingjay – Part 1, was pretty much abysmal. So the second part had to bring it back up to make the saga at least bearable. But while it did do some things different, it couldn’t help the overall movie or saga.

The first problem is that Katniss hasn’t changed throughout the movies. She doesn’t grow, she doesn’t change. She’s more or less the same girl we saw at the beginning with a minor caveat: her obsession with romantic interest Peeta (Josh Hutchinson) is astronomically annoying. Most of the major dialogue moments revolve around the baker’s boy, but they are only there to further press that Katniss has fallen in love with Peeta. The dialogue is atrocious and those scenes grind the movie to a very abrupt halt. On top of that, none of the actors really try. Let’s be honest: Josh and Liam Hemsworth – along with numerous others – are really there to get a fairly meaty paycheck. The best performance happened to be from Haymitch, played by Woody Harrelson. At the same time, he didn’t have to do much and he wasn’t in the movie for a long time.

The editing in this movie is awful too. Some shots are really weird and a lot of the cuts were off on many scenes. The sound design didn’t change at all from the previous films, but I’ve always praised the series for its sound design. It would be nice to see some variance within the films. The visual effects were pretty bad, especially really heavy action scenes. Comparatively speaking, Kingsmen: the Secret Service had better visual effects than Mockingjay – Part 2, but cost $79 million less ($81 million to $160 million). For that matter, most of the emotional moments were very hit-or-miss, with most trying to force a really tearful end, but was more or less mildly upsetting. And the end was just terrible. For a saga finale, it’s one of the worst. The tone is inconsistent and the “emotional” moments turn to overacting.

It may sound like I’m ripping into this movie, but it’s not completely bad. The actions sequences in this movie were vastly superior than the previous film. There’s a scene in a sewer that was actually very intense and pulled me to the edge of my seat. The music is good as well. James Newton Howard always delivers on his scores, and this movie is no exception. And the set design is pretty good. It looks realistic and the traps set in the movie don’t look too fake, again giving more tense actions scenes.

If there is one phrase that I can use to describe The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2, it is “wasted potential”. Everything was laid out in front of them to make a decent film, but unfortunately failed to deliver the goods. While not awful, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 failed to close the book on the Hunger Games saga in a decent manner. Here’s hoping movies learn from this as time moves forward: splitting one book into two movies is not always a good idea.