Grim, relentless and immensely satisfying, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 sends out the dystopian sci-fi franchise on a feel-bad high. Readers of Suzanne Collins’ source novel, who already know what’s coming, will be pleased by the movie’s merciless fidelity to the source material (or perhaps, considering the book is the least popular in the trilogy, will just be annoyed all over again).Download The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2, For the rest of us, who only know The Hunger Games through its wildly uneven movies, Mockingjay – Part 2 is proof that there really was more going on here all along than derivative allegories, shallow cultural commentary and trite young-adult angst. Filmmaker Francis Lawrence, who has gradually deepened the series over the last three installments (and made you forget the chintzy first picture directed by Gary Ross), doesn’t forget the somber aura that has seeped into the films, hinting at grave things to come. Civil war and fascism aren’t subjects you can wrap up with a shiny bow and glitter. Even a presumably happy ending would bear melancholy footnotes, which is the case here.
By now, the story has grown so complicated that Lawrence doesn’t try to help newcomers catch up. Mockingjay – Part 2 picks up where the previous movie left off: Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) has been rescued from the clutches of the tyrannical President Snow (Donald Sutherland) but is brainwashed to fight against Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence), Gale (Liam Hemsworth) and the rest of the underground rebels. Finnick (Sam Claflin) is preparing to wed. Johanna (Jena Malone) is still fronting. President Coin (Julianne Moore), the leader of the rebellion, and her assistant Plutarch (the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died during production) debate Katniss’s value as a symbol.Download The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2, She may be worth more as a martyr now.The bulk of Mockingjay – Part 2 is a war movie, albeit on an intimate scale, with a small group of soldiers trying to achieve an impossible military mission, beset by enemies in the form of monsters (extremely well rendered with a mixture of real actors and CGI) and less describable things, such as a giant wave of black goo that seems to be alive. Their objective is simple – take Snow down – and Katniss, armed with her iconic bow and arrow, finds new uses for her versatile weapon.
The heroes suffer big losses, as all soldiers in wars must. But the movie never generates the rush of a straightforward action picture: A sense of dread permeates the film, a feeling that this story may not be as predictable as it appears. Despite the series’ monumental success, The Hunger Games hasn’t penetrated popular culture the way superheroes or even Twilight did. Yes, you can buy a Katniss action figure, and Mockingjay – Part 2 wisely keeps the character at its center,Download The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2, even as the world is falling down around her. But who would ever want to pretend to be her?The casting of Lawrence as the anchor of this franchise now seems like a stroke of prescient genius – her talent has blossomed and matured in ways no one could have predicted – and the saga’s final chapter brings the focus back to her, reminding us of everything Katniss has lost and suffered as a result of trying to protect her younger sister in the first installment. She gets a lovely, bittersweet send-off, and the actress makes us believe in all the pain and experience etched across her face – the toll of an unwitting warrior tasked with saving the world.When Lionsgate announced they would be splitting Mockingjay in two, the move felt like a cash grab. But after seeing the new movie, the decision makes sense. Mockingjay – Part 2 really is just that: The second half of the film you started watching last year. Here is your reward for having stuck with The Hunger Games. Be careful what you wish for.
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 is 2015 upcoming science fiction based movie directed by Francis Lawrence and screenplay by Danny Strong and Peter Craig. This is second of two cinematic parts based on the novel Mockingjay. The movie shows the story of Katniss Everdeen realizing the stakes are no longer just for survival. So Katniss Everdeen teams up with her closest friends, including Peeta, Gale, and Finnick for the ultimate mission.The Hunger Games: Mockingjay- Part 2 is the last and final installment in the The Hunger Games franchise based on the best-selling novel written by Suzanne Collins.Download The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2, The movie shows the story of Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence), President Coin (Julianne Moore), and District 13 who prepare for war against President Snow (Donald Sutherland) as unrest begins to grow in Panem, and the revolution moves closer to the Capitol. The fans and lover of the trilogy should expect lots of violence and action in the bloody battle scenes as the series comes to a close.If viewers were shocked by the dark turn that the last instalment (MOCKINGJAY – PART 1) took, they had better come to the cinema prepared for PART 2 with a packet of tissues and a hip flask of something strong to take the edge off. Whether you’re read the books by Suzanne Collins or not, the fourth and final installment twists the knife with unpredictable malice as characters are plucked off one by one, grief piles up for Katniss and her comrades, and a series of explosive fight scenes culminating in a hideous civilian attack on the Capitol seem more SAVING PRIVATE RYAN than child-friendly-franchise.
And yet, these well-executed and sensitive scenes that bank on the socio-political framework of THE HUNGER GAMES, reminding us of our own societies as well us timely affairs such as the refugee crisis, flesh out an otherwise pallid film, mostly consisting of close-up conversations between Katniss and Peeta that feel too interchangeable to carry any real weight. Although Jennifer Lawrence, as ever,Download The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2, packs enough punch to overthrow an evil dictator and then some as Katniss Everdeen AKA The Mockingjay, this feels like the tail end of the third installment where momentum is dwindling and it’s all already been said in Part 1.Picking up from where the last film left off, when ex-Hunger Games partner and sort of ex-boyfriend Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson) had tried to strangle Katniss to death after being kidnapped and brain-washed by the abominable President Snow (Donald Sutherland), the first scene sets the tone for the rest of the film as we open on a tight shot of Katniss and her bruised neck, being treated in a hospital as she tentatively exercises her vocal chords. Her morose, humble, resolute face is one which carries the bulk of the film through to the end as the rest of the cast dote around her, attempting to keep her alive, aiding her ideas, and generally worship her every move.
From the base of the rebel camp in District 13, Katniss embarks on a self-proclaimed secret mission to assassinate her enemy Snow who resides in the Capitol. Her new supporting unit consist of close friends Finnick (Sam Claflin) and Cressida (Natalie Dormer), hard-as-nails commanders Boggs (Mahershala Ali) and Jackson (Michelle Forbes), and childhood sweetheart/possible future husband Gale (Liam Hemsworth). Together they work their way through the President’s new “game”: a series of lethal booby traps scattered through the Capitol which they must navigate through in order to liberate the last standing beacon of the old repressive Panem. But at what cost?The fear of loss comes into sharp focus here, and the stakes are kept dangerously high in a much more directly threatening,Download The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2, horror movie-like way. One of the stand-out scenes includes a genuinely terrifying sort of mashup between ALIEN and THE DESCENT which sees Katniss’s unit trapped in underground sewers as ‘mutts’ (eyeless rotting beings with razor-sharp teeth) close in on them. This kind of heart-attack inducing pace crops up throughout and is set by quieter moments of interaction with drive-by characters aiding the cause who, seen through the eyes of the ever empathetic Katniss, are instantly humanised, and these pinpricks of insight into the normal civilians that everyone is supposedly trying to liberate gives the film a much-needed sense of wider understanding.
MOCKINGJAY – PART 2 has a lot going for it in terms of spectacle, special effects and fight scenes that are grounded in real depth of feeling. But Jennifer Lawrence’s performance as the inspirational female leader of the revolution is the real selling point of a film that perhaps should never have been separated from its first part. She effortlessly out-shines veteran acting royalty such as Julianne Moore as the mysterious President Coin and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman as the leader’s right hand man Heavensbee, who pales disappointingly into the background. But perhaps this is the point: with all the focus so deliberately directed to Katniss’s face,Download The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2, her losses and gains hit home all the harder.It would have seemed unlikely, five years ago, that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s final screen role would come in the fourth instalment of a young adult science-fiction serial. But there’s something about Hoffman and The Hunger Games that fit.The late actor appears at the front and centre of this scorchingly tense and stylish final chapter, as the Machiavellian powerbroker Plutarch Heavensbee, who in the last film became the de facto handler of Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), the reluctant but galvanising figurehead of the rebellion against President Snow (Donald Sutherland).
In the fashion-forward world of Panem, Plutarch has always stood out. Here, he starts the film in a black casual shirt and round-necked olive tee, as if he’s just arrived on set from an off-Broadway rehearsal: you can sense the aura of scuffed white trainers emanating from just out of shot.But as always, the glamour of Hoffman’s performance comes in his looks and line-readings. “It’s so frustrating when she goes rogue,” he says of Katniss, when she slips out of the rebels’ base to make her way back towards the frontline of the struggle – but he electrifies the line with a smile, heightening the intrigue, drawing us in closer,Download The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2, and making us question what we thought we knew.That, ever since its initial instalment in 2012, has been The Hunger Games’ M.O.: bright, politically conscious storytelling that’s unafraid to look its young target audience straight in the eye, performed by a brilliant, unobvious cast. In addition to Hoffman and Sutherland, Mockingjay – Part 2 groans with the collective talents of Julianne Moore, Woody Harrelson, and of course Lawrence herself, whose own budding stardom came into bloom over the course of the franchise.After the subterranean sluggishness of the last film, too thinly spun out from the first third of Suzanne Collins’s final book, Mockingjay – Part 2 returns the series to its characteristic high gear.
Katniss is leading the rebels’ final push towards Snow’s stronghold. The rebel President Coin (Moore) is confident. The Capitol is on the back foot. Yet Katniss still finds herself nagged by doubt: in the heat of war, the side she’s fighting for no longer seems that different from the tyranny she always hoped to overthrow.The Hunger Games’ eschewal of its genre’s code of conduct has always been one of the series’ greatest strengths. Its heroine is no Chosen One, destined to save the world – instead, she’s constantly fighting her fate, first by volunteering in place of her sister for the gladiatorial Battle Royale that set the series in motion, and ever since by defying the rebellion’s attempts to shape her into some kind of unifying icon.Nevertheless, Katniss plays along, in the hope that it will bring her close enough to the leonine Snow to assassinate him. She and her squad creep through the Capitol’s futuro-brutalist streetscape,Download The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2, evading booby-trapped “pods”, which variously unleash fire, bullets and flash-floods of oil, and the vampirically monstrous mutts, who prowl the city’s network of very Tarkovskian waterlogged tunnels.The scale and stakes of the mission are both pricklingly palpable, and bit-players all add their own herbal tang to the infusion (I loved Natalie Dormer’s pugnacious director of “propos” – the short propaganda films the rebels use to gee up support). The final confrontation between Katniss and Snow, capped by a very particular look Sutherland shoots Lawrence at a crucial juncture, is worth the admission fee alone.It’s sad to see this deservedly successful franchise reach the end of its run: but here’s hoping its dissident spirit will survive in young-adult blockbusters to come.
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