The action, dimly promising as it is, happens later. This turgid middle chapter, meanwhile, offers little more than a series of Katniss's slack-jawed reaction GIFs.
The Hunger Games is a story about civil war over forms of government and control of the means of production. According to its own dialogue: a battle for democracy, justice, and the fruits of labor. But it also portrays a world in which a serious argument about politics is unimaginable, because politics, although worthy of a war, raises no hard or even interesting questions. It is just possible that this makes The Mockingjay: Part I the political movie for our time.
There's a solid, weighty feel to the movie, and I did like Jeffrey Wright as a ‘Q' figure showing off his weaponry – "Regular, incendiary and explosive arrows! All colour-coded!" – but this overlong non-climax mostly comes off drab and creaky, looking ahead to next year when the Games can (finally) begin.
Sluggish, stodgy, overprocessed, a Velveeta fantasy, "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1" is nonetheless a clever mash-up of cinematic tropes and political perceptions, and its appeal—aside from the popularity of the book series on which it is based—owes much to that combination of elements.
There's a real wallop in the way leading-lady Jennifer Lawrence silently ambles through post-apocalyptic devastation... He lets the character truly be in this suspended moment; it's akin to that beautiful scene in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I" when Harry and Hermione slow dance to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
So much skill and craftsmanship and good writing and acting and costuming and production design go into this movie that it feels churlish to respond with resentment. But it's possible — perhaps even necessary — to enjoy the movie and despise how abruptly it ends.
{It's} a bleak, sometimes dire experience, and not only because it's the darkest installment yet in an already dark saga, catching dystopian rebels in a beaten-down and demoralized state. As written by regular series scribes Peter Craig and Danny Strong, and as directed by Francis Lawrence (who helmed the second film in the series, "Hunger Games: Catching Fire"), it also feels a bit stretched out...
The movie's power comes from keen observations of its one-of-a-kind heroine, who barely manages to pick her way through political minefields and pitched combat. As Katniss Everdeen, Jennifer Lawrence embodies a quality rare in American pop movies: heroic confusion. Both Lawrences, director and actor, pull the audience into Katniss's inchoate longings, shriveling sorrows, and conflicting loyalties.
In its war games and their officers, Mockingjay Part 1 – unlike Catching Fire (2013) – definitively catches fire. But where Beetee's broadcast to the Capitol is noise disguising the action of the raid, the film's driving pace and showy set pieces threaten to drown out the centre of the story.
Over the course of the film one realizes that the insurgency is just as ruthless as the government in manipulating popular opinion. This is the most cynical development yet in a remarkably cynical series, implying that anyone who aspires to political leadership is more concerned with power and public image than with causes. Whereas the previous entries in the series appealed to liberals and conservatives alike, this one manages to insult them both.
More than two years later, the off-screen battlegrounds have shifted, but Ms. Davidson's take remains as valid as ever. And"Mockingjay Part 1" is indisputably a war movie, from tearful start to unsettling end. Its director is Francis Lawrence, who did the honors in the second movie, and he does a serviceable job again of pulling the parts together.
We see in Mockingjay Part 1 the depths of extreme emotion not as a lily-livered by-product of suffering to be swept under the rug, but as the rallying essence of what we are all looking for in cinema and beyond: Francis Lawrence, his actors, production team and crew have given us a blockbuster that uses all its wit and wile to fly on the wings of what makes us human.