The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part I

'Part I': two words that chill me to the bone where any 'trilogy' is concerned. My mind makes a swift and painful return to the fateful first chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. That dance. That kiss. With their eyes firmly on the profits, film studios are increasingly using adaptation as a means of turning reasonably structured texts into bloated cinematic non-sequitors. There was no need for the last Potter film to be cut in two; nor, I'm sure, was the world well served by yet another Twilight. I haven't seen it. I'll make the claim nonetheless.

So it was with trepidation that I approached this third instalment in the Hunger Games franchise. Its predecessors are slick, well-crafted additions to the teen adventure genre, and they successfully counteract the inevitable cliches with nuanced insights into the moral and political ambivalences of Suzanne Collins's dystopia. It also helps that Jennifer Lawrence is really very good in everything all the time. People often talk about teen heroes and heroines in fairly unimaginative terms: they are 'likeable' or 'sympathetic.' Katniss Everdeen is better than that: she is interesting, and complicated, and not always that nice.

Following a second brutal run in the sadistic reality show that is The Hunger Games, Katniss finds herself esconced in District Thirteen, a concealed military base preparing for revolution. She spends a while being quite stroppy, largely because her rescuers failed to save fellow volunteer Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) from the clutches of the Capitol. President Snow, played with malignant intensity by Donald Sutherland, delights in dangling Peeta in front of the rebels via a series of staged interviews, hosted by a dentally luminescent Stanley Tucci. This is the real thematic focus of the film: the relationship between media and power. Both sides embark upon elaborate propaganda campaigns, creating an uneasy symmetry between state and rebel force. Katniss is the reluctant face of a war fought with screens; a revolution that begins to look curiously like the teen adventure genre it finds itself in.

There is certainly a real seed of interest here in the way conflict is mediated by modern technology, and there are some provocative if unpalatable overlaps with contemporary footage from Syria, not to mention the recent report on torture practices in the C.I.A. But the film drags in places. Boy two in the obligatory love triangle, Gale (Liam Hemsworth), is once again trapped in a personality-free zone. His generic 'pained' expression does not vary -- perhaps he had heartburn all through shooting? This is annoyingly at the expense of other characters: the fascinatingly tattooed filmmaker Cressida (Natalie Dormer) and the always entertaining will-they-won't-they pair, Effie (Elizabeth Banks) and Haymitch (Woody Harrelson). The film is dedicated to the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, who resumes the role of Plutarch Heavensbee with a performance that showcases his usual combination of gritty charm and integrity. 

It is no surprise that this third instalment feels like a disjointed accompaniment to its predecessors. Without the rapid but formulaic pace of things in the arena, director Francis Lawrence has to really delve into the story's knotty ethics, with the odd explosion thrown in for good measure. The result is good but not great; an unsettling and uncertain half-of-a-film.