In a sentenceEveryone is in grey, everything is concrete, and the war stops every twenty minutes for someone to cry in a stairwell
Panem, the final year of the war. In the underground bunkers of District 13, Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is recovering from an attack by Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson), whom the Capitol has conditioned to kill her. President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore) and Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman) want her in front of a camera as the Mockingjay; Katniss wants to be in the Capitol with an arrow for President Snow (Donald Sutherland). After the rebels take District 2, she stows away to the front and joins a squad with Gale Hawthorne (Liam Hemsworth), Finnick Odair (Sam Claflin) and a film crew, advancing street by street through a city laced with booby traps the Capitol calls pods. Then Coin sends Peeta to join them.
Plays from YouTube when you press play; nothing loads from them until then.
Francis Lawrence closes the series with a grim, careful war film that has one great set piece and about forty minutes it does not need. Jennifer Lawrence and Donald Sutherland hold it up; the decision to split the last book does not.
Francis Lawrence’s third film in the series, and the second half of the last novel in Suzanne Collins’s trilogy, finishes the job with the arena gone and a war in its place. Katniss Everdeen is no longer a contestant. She is a symbol owned by a committee, and the film is about what the committee does with her and what she does to get free of it. It is grim, careful and well acted, it has one sequence that frightened us properly, and it is about forty minutes too long, because there was half a book to fill and the film fills it.
Jennifer Lawrence carries nearly every scene and does it hoarse. Katniss opens the film with a damaged voice and a brace on her neck, saying as little as she can, and Lawrence makes the silences count; you can watch her decide not to trust someone across a briefing table. Her best scenes are opposite Donald Sutherland, who plays President Snow as a man who has already lost and is enjoying the view. They understand each other better than anyone on their own side does. Julianne Moore’s Coin, in a grey bob and a flat, patient voice, is the quieter threat: every speech is about the people and none of it is to them.
Jo Willems shoots the Capitol as a city after a bombing, in the colour of wet cement, and the rebels’ fatigues, by Kurt Swanson and Bart Mueller, are only a shade darker than the rubble. Coin wears the same grey as her bunkers; Snow still has a white rose in his lapel, the one bright thing the film allows him. Philip Messina’s Capitol is a concrete estate the size of a county, and his pods are the best idea in it: a plaza that erupts in black tar, a courtyard that floods, streets that look empty and are mined. For its middle hour the film has a shape, one block at a time, and it is at its most watchable when a squad is standing at a corner working out which way is less likely to kill them.
Then they go underground, and for ten minutes the film is as good as anything in the series. Pale, eyeless creatures come up through the sewers hissing Katniss’s name, lit only by the squad’s lamps. Mark Yoshikawa and Alan Edward Bell cut it fast and clean, so we always know where the exit is and how far away, and James Newton Howard drops the orchestra to a low drone. We were frightened. We jumped at least twice, and we forgot we were watching a 12A until the squad was back on the street. It is the one stretch with the nerve of the first two films, and it is over quickly.
The trouble is everything the film does to fill its running time. The first forty minutes are a second set-up: the bunkers of District 13 again, the propaganda crew again, Katniss asking to be sent to the front and being told no. Peter Craig and Danny Strong’s screenplay gives Gale (Liam Hemsworth) and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) a conversation about which of them she will choose while she pretends to sleep, and it is as awkward as that sounds. Woody Harrelson and Elizabeth Banks are here for a few scenes each; Banks gets one good look and Harrelson gets nothing to do. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Plutarch appears briefly and says little, and the film is tactful about it.
Catching Fire (2013) had an arena and a clock, and Francis Lawrence used both. This has neither, and the decision to split the novel means it starts with its momentum already spent. The second half takes turns we will not describe. We will say that the film is braver about them than most franchise finales, and one caught us off guard and upset us; we will also say that it then ends four or five times, and by the last of them we had stopped feeling anything and started noticing the fades to black.
Watch it close to Part 1 (2014), because this is the second half of one film and plays better as one. The sewer earns the certificate, the two presidents earn the ticket, and the rest is a long grey walk between them. It runs 137 minutes and carries a 12A.
Most critics come down in favour of this finale, if not by much: fourteen of the thirty reviews are positive, ten mixed and six negative. Jennifer Lawrence’s performance is singled out by almost everyone, with particular credit for the gap she plays between Katniss’s private misery and her public image. The action is the other point of agreement, above all the sequence in the Capitol sewers, and several reviews say the film takes the ethics of war and propaganda more seriously than a blockbuster needs to.
The reservations gather around length and shape. The split-book structure, the slow opening and the succession of endings are faulted again and again, and the dour final stretch wears down even sympathetic critics. The spread is wide: The Wrap calls it smart, exciting and heartfelt, while The Hollywood Reporter and the Los Angeles Times find it tedious and anti-climactic, and Eye for Film, alone, blames Lawrence herself.
The review gives the finale a positive rating. It singles out Katniss’s determination and the tense action for praise.
Read the full review →The review calls the finale a gritty, somber conclusion rather than a straightforward victory parade. It suggests that this mournful tone suits the action series.
Read the full review →Maytum finds the film a satisfying, high-stakes send-off, despite clunky moments and sidelined supporting characters. He especially praises Jennifer Lawrence’s performance and the film’s impressive action set-pieces.
Read the full review →The critic finds the final installment the franchise’s most satisfying film. The available text singles out its overall satisfaction, without specifying a particular element.
Read the full review →Debruge finds the finale a dark, deliberate and satisfying conclusion, though its succession of endings strains patience. He praises Jennifer Lawrence’s subtle performance and the film’s carefully built Capitol siege.
Read the full review →O'Hara finds it a compelling, emotionally weighty finale, though its solemnity and fidelity to the book sometimes bog it down. She particularly praises the tense, inventive action sequences and Jennifer Lawrence's central performance.
Read the full review →Part of · 4 of 4
Battle RoyaleThe Japanese film this series owes a debt to, and far nastier about paying it.
Children of MenAnother grey, bombed-out revolution, shot in long takes with the nerve this one lacks.
Come and SeeA child in a war; the film this one is gesturing at when it goes quiet.
The Battle of AlgiersRebels, occupiers and the cameras between them, with no side allowed a clean win.
Rogue One: A Star Wars StoryA franchise war film that commits to what rebellion costs, and does not flinch.
Free account
Two lists that know where things are streaming, collections you can share, your own score beside ours, and Discover that remembers what you have seen.
