I don’t think they should of made Mockingjay 2 movies. I thought it after I saw the first and I thought it again after I concluded the series. The choice is to milk it for more money, show a little bit more, and they were successful on both those fronts. We know Mockingjay is going to make bank, but it doesn’t make it any less true that these movies are weaker apart.
I loved the first two Hunger Games movies. I thought they were amazing looking, had awesome characters, and really made you feel for the citizens of Panem. Mockingjay felt like a rushed, far weaker closing to this “trilogy.” Splitting up the movies led to a far weaker first movie where nothing happened, and was horribly boring. They had to fill 2 hours and they did not have anything to fill it with, so it felt cold, careless and struggling for story. Mockingjay part 2 felt like it was half a movie. At barely over 2 hours it really didn’t deliver that much either. It was intended to have a “Hunger Games” style arena type movie, but it was a small part of the movie and felt very weak compared to the previous arenas. It all was just a poor choice.
Mockingjay part 2 ends as you would expect. It delivers on your expectations of what is supposed to happen. It delivers the ending of a teen book trilogy. I think that is where I am most disappointed, after all of this build up, years of story, and millions of dollars, it ended, and it was not exciting or unexpected. It ended with a sunset and a fade to black and felt like I didn’t even need to see this movie to get to this ending. This movie is more a failure of story and executive decisions, than it was on ground level execution. I don’t know which is worse.
So as I stated in my other review for this week. If I was going to pick a movie for this weekend, I would pick The Night Before. It is a far better movie all around. You can catch Mockingjay on HBO whenever it comes out on that.
