The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Review part 2
So this film is the top of that heap but being the best of the worst is not always the same as being good. This film has it’s issues and compared to what I consider a good movie it is at best trivial and mediocre. Unless you have something invested in the film (like, say, you read the books over and over again and dream of yourself as Katniss (or boy Katniss)) you will be reasonably entertained for 123 minutes and go home vaguely pissed that they stretched this last film into two movies while going about the rest of your life. It is good solid entertainment but it won’t blow your mind the way A Clockwork Orange did to me at 17.
I guess the issue I take with this film is up until now the series has been relatively smart. Stuff made sense and I didn’t feel let down by the characters doing stupid things. However once they raised the scope of the film from a Battle Royale reality show and your concern for the individual characters you care about into a country wide revolution the individuals have to get a whole lot stupider to keep the plot going. 
I spotted about 8 different ways President Snow could have ended the revolution (most of them rhyming with “puclear” or “bustained sombardment”) but he wants to play head games while his white armored Stormtroopers seem to have forgotten which end of their assault rifle the pew pew comes out of when shooting at guys climbing trees 20 feet away. Meanwhile the revolutionaries get equally as stupid in order to properly fall into obvious traps.
Also while I enjoyed this film in general the padding was pretty blatant. How many times do we need to see a wrecked field of human corpses in order to establish that President Snow is evil? Also what is the deal with him being so evil? A little character development on President Snow would be nice. Did he start out evil and just take joy in killing innocent children or did he have to work up to it? Does he really think he is doing something good? It’s rare that someone wakes up and says “Today I will be a total bastard”. Most people think they are doing the best they can but he was so evil that he turned into a caricature and thus lowered the actual impact of the movie. He felt a lot like Dr. Evil and therefore turned Katniss and her crew into Austin Powers.
(continued)
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