Wanna see a great movie about civil war? Go see “Gone With The Wind”. Remember “Frankly my dear…” and “fiddley dee” and… this lousy fantasy (it isn’t a dystopia at all) is terrible. I don’t say a movie has to have memorable language, Charlie Chaplin directed many that didn’t have one good line, but then they invented the talkies… “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1” on the other hand is a 100 million buck extravaganza and it is chump change, the language is so bland it is shameful. Movies for dummies, a bloated piece of crap, hell it is worse than “Deadly Hollows Part I”, another waste of space, and a cynical excuse to add a movie where none exists.
For the first of the series way back in 2012, in some future world where they don’t have cell phones but they do have everything else, the world is ruled by Donald Sutherland and every year they have the Hunger Games where one kid between 12 and 18 years of age are stuck in a jungle and fight to the death with 12 others till only one lives. Got it? In # 1, a nicely little self-contained movie, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) wins the game with Josh Hutcherson, and Liam Hemsworth and Josh sulk for her love.
In #2 they already couldn’t make a self contained story and # 3 is worse, with one of the most idiotic storylines where the big bad Sutherland makes a mistake so huge it defies anybodies ability to believe and… oh, what’s the point, it is easier to believe in the tooth fairy than this astoundingly lazy and silly sequel setting up the Part Two denouement. As for Katniss? I wouldn’t follow her to the bathroom for a line of coke.
If there is a more repulsive or cynical scene in movies than Katniss visiting a hospital here, I don’t know it. Have we come this far from the fall of Atlanta to the this trash? This manipulative, atrocious, cynical boring garbage?
I don’t expect a sci fi dystopia to have much reality as such, but I do expect it to have an internal reality and this has none, hell “The Giver” was better. No smart dialogue, no action, no beauty, so surprises (except in the enormous, plot driven mistakes being made). Vivian Leigh is doing cartwheels.
Grade: D+
