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In honor of the title we'll break this part of the sentence with a colon, and then use a portentous dash:
“The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1” is a worthy third movie in the Suzanne Collins franchise — destined to satisfy the legions of filmgoers willing to swing with a lot of scheming and skulking in an underground bunker resembling the world's most frightening Marriott, in order to get to the revolution.
The third book in Collins' dystopian-literature juggernaut has been halved. As such, following the lucrative blueprint of the “Harry Potter” and the “Twilight” film series, this pentultimate “Hunger Games” chapter has what all such films have, namely, a few stretch marks and an ending that goes beyond “cliffhanger.”
And it works. The film works. The scale of these “Hunger Games” dys-lit film adaptations is large but not misjudged, and there's always a new post-apocalyptic district to explore in detail. From the first, they got the casting so very right with this ongoing project, from Jennifer Lawrence (a crier, but also a fighter, and a fiercely talented performer) on down.
Not everything in “Mockingjay” is dynamic or remarkable. Director Lawrence, working from Peter Craig and Danny Strong's screenplay, occasionally mistakes somnambulance for solemnity. But having come through the “Twilight” movies more or less in one piece (not all of them stank, for the record), it's easy to appreciate how Collins' world (a bit thin on the page, but irresistible to millions) has been realized on screen. In “Mockingjay,” Plutarch turns our heroine into a movie-style action heroine for the purposes of his revolution marketing campaign, and it's as if the movie is making fun of its own image in the popular culture. First Katniss was a feral woodland creature; then, in the second movie, she swanned into legend as a flaming fashion star. Now she's a warrior both for fake and for real, and that double-headed assignment gives Lawrence and company a lot to activate. The series wraps up with the release of “Mockingjay 2” in November 2015. As the old Ira Gershwin lyric put it: Comes the revolution, all is jake / Comes the revolution, we'll be eating cake.
"The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1" - 3 stars
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for intense sequences of violence and action, some disturbing images and thematic material)
Running time: 2:03
Opens: Thursday evening
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