Film reviews: The Hunger Games - Mockingjay Part 1

IN AN updated dictionary of received ideas, the entry for Jennifer Lawrence would state that no matter how awful the film, she can do no wrong.

Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen, with Liam Hemsworth as Gale Hawthorne. Picture: AP

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 (12A)

Director: Francis Lawrence

Running time: 123 minutes

Star rating: ***

In the course of Mockingjay – Part 1, however, there’s an incidental jolt: Jennifer Lawrence acting badly.

Lawrence has brought an unforced acting style into Hunger Games’ preposterous intrigues, forging a bond with an audience that remains air-tight through two films in which teenagers engage in modern gladiatorial combat for the amusement of the dystopian empire of Panem. At the end of Catching Fire, Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen had become a symbol of rebellion, ending the games for President Snow (Donald Sutherland). Now in Mockingjay – Part 1, she’s hiding out in an underground bunker where the designers seem to have used 1984 as a style bible.

Appearance is on everyone’s mind: the rebels’ chilly President Coin (Julianne Moore) has been persuaded by her spin doctor Plutarch (Philip Seymour Hoffman, in a final substantial role) that Katniss should be the focal point of their propaganda videos. Alas, when they try her out in a studio, her delivery is less Liberty from the French Revolution and more like a turn from Women’s Institute panto.

Lawrence has a lot of fun pretending to be an awful actress, and it’s a rare, sly, subversive scene in a film that feels very much like what it is – 50 per cent of a book, halved to keep a lucrative franchise going.

“It’s the worst terror in the world waiting for something,” Coin tells Katniss. Ain’t that the truth: Mockingjay – Part 1 is entirely about marking time until Part 2 comes along and wraps things up, which makes it a limited pleasure unless you are a hardcore Lawrence fan. Even for a young adult movie, this is not a subtle piece of work, ringing every good deed by Katniss with a halo and boo-hissing her evil foe President Snow.

Sutherland has been shown toying with white flowers since Hunger Games, but Mockingjay just can’t leave the symbolism alone. When Katniss impulsively decides to visit the ruins of her former home town, she finds a single white bud on her old writing desk. Later there’s some chatty exposition about what the flowers conceal, followed by a cascade of blooms when another city is reduced to rubble. Things may be bad for the citizens of Panem, but not if you are a florist.

The malevolent colour-coding even extends to Katniss’s reality TV partner and public boyfriend Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), who has been captured by the president, tortured, then forced to go on TV as a pro-state propaganda tool, dressed in a luminously white suit. The film’s overly laminated deliberateness is telegraphing Snow’s influence, but distractingly also reminds us that so far, no-one has made a movie version of Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased).

Few multipart movies end elegantly, especially when they are chopped for profit rather than dramatic impact. Mockingjay is no more dextrous than Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part 1, or The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug; you might call its final scene a cliffhanger, but it’s more like watching your cast rev up and drive towards a wall at high speed, then have the cinema hit the lights and tell us all to come back next year.

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On general release

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On general release from Friday

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On general release from Friday

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Glasgow Film Theatre until Sunday; Edinburgh Filmhouse, Friday until 11 December