- UK release: November 2015
- Director: Francis Lawrence · Writers: Peter Craig; Danny Strong
- Studio / distributor: Lionsgate; Color Force
- Genre: Dystopian war adventure / young-adult science fiction · Runtime: 137 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone, Silver Linings Playbook) as Katniss Everdeen; Josh Hutcherson (Bridge to Terabithia) as Peeta Mellark; Liam Hemsworth (The Expendables 2) as Gale Hawthorne; Donald Sutherland (Don’t Look Now, Ordinary People) as President Snow
- Rotten Tomatoes: 69% critics / 66% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Four films and one split novel later, the saga that began with children killing each other for television finally arrives at the only place it was ever heading: a war. Mockingjay - Part 2 is the back half of a book that did not need cutting in two, and Lionsgate’s decision to stretch Suzanne Collins’s thinnest volume across two releases has been the franchise’s most-grumbled-about move. The good news is that the back half is the half with the ending, and Francis Lawrence, who has steered every entry since Catching Fire, brings it home with more nerve than the strategy deserved.
The setup
The rebellion that Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) became the symbol of has rolled almost to the gates of the Capitol, and she has stopped being content to wave a bow for the cameras. Against orders, she attaches herself to a unit pushing into the city, intent on reaching President Snow (Donald Sutherland) and ending him herself. The trouble is that the Capitol’s streets have been seeded with traps designed by the same Gamemakers who once built the arenas, so the final approach plays as one more set of pods to be survived, only now the cameras are gone and the dying is for keeps.
What gives the film its spine is the doubt underneath the mission. Katniss has been a weapon for so long that she has started to wonder who is really pointing her, and whether the leadership she is fighting for, embodied in District 13’s Coin (Julianne Moore), is any cleaner than the one she is fighting against.
The cast
Jennifer Lawrence has carried this series since Winter’s Bone announced her as someone who could play wary, watchful and dangerous all at once, and here she works mostly in exhaustion. This is a Katniss running on fumes, grief and stubbornness, and Lawrence resists every chance to make her triumphant. Josh Hutcherson has the harder, less showy job as Peeta, returned from the Capitol with his mind tampered with, no longer sure whether his love for Katniss is real or installed, and he gives the brainwashing a genuine, twitchy unease rather than playing it for melodrama. Liam Hemsworth’s Gale is the blunter point of the love triangle, and the film at last gives him a moral edge worth playing.
Around them the adults steady the world. Donald Sutherland’s Snow is a study in soft-spoken rot, a man who smiles while he poisons, and Sutherland plays him with the unhurried menace of an actor who has been doing this since Don’t Look Now. Julianne Moore’s Coin is the film’s quiet masterstroke, all reasonable tone and cold arithmetic.
The craft
Francis Lawrence and cinematographer Jo Willems shoot the Capitol as a beautiful trap, its white avenues turning lethal without warning, and the standout sequence, a flooded underground tunnel stalked by pale, screeching creatures, is the closest the franchise has come to outright horror. It is tense, clammy filmmaking, staged for claustrophobia rather than spectacle. James Newton Howard’s score keeps its sombre register throughout, refusing the swell of victory the genre usually leans on. The whole film is darker, in tone and in actual lighting, than anything in the series so far, and at 137 minutes it earns its length by treating the march on the Capitol as a slow, attritional thing rather than a highlight reel.
If there is a craft cost to the two-part split, it is in the opening hour, which still carries the freight of being the second half of a story whose first half was mostly setup. The film takes a while to build momentum. Once it does, it does not let go.
How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is Catching Fire, still the high point of the franchise, sharper and more surprising than anything here. Mockingjay - Part 2 cannot match that arena-bound tension, but it is a clear improvement on Part 1, which was largely a feature-length prologue. The other comparison the series invites is the Harry Potter endgame, Deathly Hallows - Part 2, another franchise finale built from the back half of a split book, with the same willingness to let the closing chapter go grim and funereal rather than celebratory. Against the broader young-adult dystopia boom it helped create, the Divergent and Maze Runner films, this remains the smartest and least cynical of the lot.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are landing around 69%, with audiences a touch lower at 66%, and the split tells its own story. The praise goes to Lawrence and to the bleak political turn of the ending, which refuses the clean catharsis the genre trains you to expect. The complaints are almost all about the structure: a story stretched too thin, a slow first act, a final book that should have been one film. That is a fair charge against the business decision, less so against this instalment, which carries the weight of the ending well. The lower audience number reads to me as a fanbase that wanted a victory lap and got a reckoning instead.
Verdict
I came to this series for the world-building, the surveillance-state satire and the central performance, and the finale delivers on all three while having the spine to end on a note of moral unease rather than triumph. It is not as tight as Catching Fire, and the two-part split leaves it carrying ballast it should not have to, but the underground sequence alone is some of the best craft in the franchise, and the final twist gives the whole saga a harder, more honest shape than dystopian blockbusters usually manage. It rewards a rewatch, especially back to back with Part 1, where the dead first hour finally pays off. A grim, satisfying close to a series that always took its premise more seriously than it had to. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now, with the earlier three films widely available on DVD, Blu-ray and digital to catch up before the finale.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: the series later doubled back to its own origins with The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2023), a prequel charting a young Coriolanus Snow, which gave Donald Sutherland’s reptilian president an unexpected backstory. The four original films have settled in as the benchmark for the young-adult dystopia wave, outlasting the Divergent series that fell apart before reaching its own finale. All four stream on various platforms depending on region and are routinely bundled as a boxset.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence, threat. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There are frequent scenes of moderate violence, with shootings, explosions and arrow strikes, but with very little bloodshed shown.
Threat and horror: There is moderate threat in a sequence where Katniss and her friends are attacked by zombie-like creatures in an underground tunnel. A battle follows in which the creatures are shot and stabbed, but without any detail of injury.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
