‘The Hunger Games’ series finally wraps up with ‘Mockingjay – Part 2’

This movie was made for two reasons and two reasons only. More than anything, it was made so the studios could suck just a few million dollars more out of audiences by making them sit through two two-hour movies instead of just one three-hour movie.

Second, it’s so every teenage girl who had her “life changed forever” by the books can see the characters she loves up on screen one more time. It’s the same reason why “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” by J.K. Rowling and “Breaking Dawn” by Stephanie Myers were split into two movies for their final installments.

Now “The Deathly Hallows” is 759 pages and “Breaking Dawn” is 756, so as unfortunate as it was, I’d glad they were two two-hour thirty-minute movies rather than one five-hour movie for either of those. The problem is “Mockingjay” is 392 pages—not nearly long enough to warrant a two-part film adaptation.

Right out of the gate, this movie fails for reasons that are not even its or the filmmakers own faults. It’s the studio trying to get as many teenage girls in the seats as possible. And darn it all, it worked perfectly.

Picking up in literally in the next scene after the last shot of “Mockingjay – Part 1,” the war over the dystopian Panem rages on with the rebels pushing ever closer towards taking the Capitol down. Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) has had enough of being the Mockingjay—the inspirational symbol of the rebellion—and wants nothing more than to personally get rid of Panem’s dictator, President Snow (Donald Sutherland), and end the war for good.

As a special team designed to be the face of the rebellion rather than actually fight for Panem, Katniss teams up with her closest friends, Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) and Gale (Liam Hemsworth), and others she’s met in District 13 as they head into the Capitol.

Waiting for them are some of the sneakiest, deadliest and biggest traps they’ve ever seen. But the truths they learn about themselves and the leaders they thought they knew may lead to the worst fight of all, ultimately deciding the fates of tens of millions Katniss swore to avenge.

Jennifer Lawrence’s acting is the only reason I ever rooted for Katniss throughout this whole series. Lawrence is one of the best actors of the decade—by far one of the best who’s only 25 years old. With three Oscar nominations including a win already on her resume and the record-breaking Hunger Games series making her a household name overnight back in 2012.

But besides her credentials, Lawrence is sincere, honest, and human. I care about Katniss because Lawrence makes me care about her. However, there were a few times when Katniss looked so tired of dealing with the rebellion that it looked more as if Lawrence was just sick of filming this series.

No matter what, she succeeds in making the character go through some serious stuff, and the way Katniss develops makes us root for her every time is due to Lawrence’s acting.

The real heroes of this cast, however, are the older actors who are real thespians. I’m talking about Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks, Jeffrey Wright, Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Donald Sutherland, the final two being the best of the bunch, truly elevating the series to tragic drama that could rival Shakespeare.

Never does any one of those names disappoint for you one second. Every time any of them are on screen interacting with one another, they’re the most believable moments of the movies. It’s perfect.

I wish I could say that for everyone younger than 35 years old, because I honestly don’t care about anyone other than Katniss and Finnick—another one of her friends and fellow rebels. The whole love triangle with Peeta and Gale that they’ve been building up from the beginning is so forced and so clichéd at this point that no matter what happens to either of them I don’t care.

Without giving away spoilers, the ending isn’t the worst by any means, but even after everything all of these younger characters have been through, I don’t care about their fates because the movie hasn’t made me care. And that’s the studio’s fault for making this movie into two parts and ruining the flow.

The pacing throughout this whole second part is awkward and nothing like the rest of the movies, which is a shame because “Mockingjay – Part 1” had excellent pacing. Here, there are a few good well-paced sections of action, but they are few and far between with most of the rest of it slow. Not that slow can’t be good, but most of the time I can’t wait for the next scene to get going.

“The Hunger Games” had a great run and was one of the best young-adult book adaptations we’ve had. “Catching Fire” and “Mockingjay – Part 1” were remarkable, but the final act couldn’t live up to the expectations its predecessors hinted at.

“Mockingjay – Part 2” should have never existed, which is its biggest fault and sadly isn’t even its own doing. But for the actors, the characters and the finale to a worldwide phenomenon, it’s definitely worth it.

 

‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ redefines expectations for action and sci-fi movies

For the man who practically invented the post-apocalyptic movie genre as we know it today, making another “Mad Max” movie 30 years after the last one was a gamble. But George Miller has not only matched the marks set by his original trilogy—he has surpassed them with flying colors.

Miller’s vision of his increasingly disparate future takes the type of movies filled with vehicular mayhem, violence galore and non-stop intensity and challenges them to become smart, thought-provoking works of art.

For George Miller, it is a lovely, lovely day.

In the stark wasteland of the Australian desert, a broken humanity is sparsely populated and driven to one instinct: survival at any cost. Between the crazed fighting for the necessities of life and the unending ravage for gasoline, a loner named Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) is unwantedly caught in the middle.

Max finds himself on the run with the resilient Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a woman of action who believes her route to survival is escaping the clutches of a ruthless gang leader and making it across the desert to her childhood homeland. With the harsh desert sands in front of them and ruthless marauders led by the dictator Immortan Joe behind, only the maddest will prevail the storm.

Luckily, all these years later, Max is still mad.

While many reboots seem more like a love letters to their predecessors with obvious jokes and references, Miller’s use of the same actors for the same minor characters and the same props, vehicles and images from the originals only enhances the world’s realism. These aren’t references, though—they are proof that this is the same, insane universe and nothing has changed. Right from the opening sequence, this looks and feels like nothing but a “Mad Max” movie.

The biggest reason the world looks just like it did in the originals is most of the special effects are really on screen. Yes, many of the landscapes, the sandstorm and the two-headed lizard were CGI, but all of the vehicles, sets and props are actually there and fully functional.

One of the gang’s trucks has a wall of speakers 10 feet high by 12 feet wide with a blindfolded guitarist blaring out hard rock riffs on his double-necked flame-thrower guitar on the hood while bungee jumping. In the back of the truck are six drummers pounding out primitive rhythms on barrel-sized timpani. When this truck is on screen, it’s going 50 mph in the Australian desert with 30 mph winds blowing sand everywhere. While many filmmakers would have used green-screen and computer graphics, Miller has everything there and it all really works. The movie looks the better and the realer for it.

Even though this is a “Mad Max” movie, the real star and hero is Charlize Theron as Furiosa. In a movie with seemingly non-stop action, there are many (relatively) quieter and intimate scenes of character development that mostly revolve around Furiosa and her story. But even with the waves of feminism rippling under the current of the movie and in many moviegoers’ minds, the decisions behind making the heroic renegade a new woman instead of Mad Max are sincere.

It doesn’t matter what her gender is, because Theron plays Furiosa an inspiring person with a tragic past. What does matter is that she is disabled and has a mechanical arm. Does it matter how she lost her arm? Not really, but that’s okay because she is still a hero who doesn’t let her handicap define her.

All we know about the characters is what Max ask them, which are only the basic plot devises since Max is not a talker. But in a movie like this, character comes from the actions taken and not the words spoken. There is more power in an image lasting five seconds than any monologue no matter how long, and Miller knows this.

Not only are Theron and Hardy excellent as Furiosa and Max, but Nicholas Hoult is astonishing as Nux, a follower of Joe and his gang who has to decide between blindly following the cult or doing what he feels is right by helping Max and Furiosa. Hoult has grown immensely as a professional in recent years, playing roles in recent “X-Men” movies, the comedy “Warm Bodies” and the critically praised “A Single Man.” His range is wide and he delivers emotional, relatable performances in every movie he’s done so far.

If anything, “Mad Max: Fury Road” has become the pinnacle of the action/adventure and post-apocalyptic cinematic experience. The pacing is perfect with quieter character-focused moments never going on longer than they have to. When they do need to happen, they do with minimal dialogue, letting the visuals tell the story for the characters. Most often character development happens during the pure action sequences, making car crashes that have been around for decades new, exciting and personal again.

The scope is huge, the fun is non-stop, the action is real and the characters more real. There is no fear by the filmmakers to make this a sequel that ups the ante on every level. And no one apologizes for making this the exact kind of movie it wants to be. It’s soft-spoken and invincible. It’s about unjust systems and no system at all. It’s about people, humanity and life in general disguised as a two-hour demolition derby.

And it took a mastermind like George Miller to make perfect sense of that insane world—that beautiful, hectic, mad world.