"The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1" (2014) REVIEW

Prepare yourselves for a dragged-out, two-hour Hunger Games experience where Katniss Everdeen shoots only one arrow. Seriously, we get more arrow action in CW's Arrow, and that's on a TV budget.

Shortly after surviving the 75th Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen wakes up in the forgotten, underground base of District 13. Survivors of the bombing of District 12 are there as well, preparing for a revolution to overthrow the Capitol, and they want Katniss to lead the revolution (or at least be their mascot). At first, Katniss is against the idea, but when she finds out Peeta Mellark, her fellow survivor in the past two Hunger Games, is still alive and under Capitol control, she decides to bring the revolution to full force.

I have not read the book (I couldn't get past Catching Fire), but I do know Mockingjay is not very long, only 400 pages. From my friends who have read the book, they have told me the movie covers about a quarter of the book and, honestly, feels like a quarter of a movie, perhaps thirty to forty minutes, that was expanded to two hours. Thanks to this, the movie drags for what feels like forever and sometimes even retreads itself of redoing some scenes. Sure, the bits of action that were there were great, the story is great, but horribly executed with its loose editing.

I get that the filmmakers wanted to create a big build-up to an epic conclusion, but if this was what they wanted, they should have kept Mockingjay as one movie.

2/5 Stars

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