I have avoided writing this review for three days now because I just don’t want to do it.  By marking a delay though, I did note something to add.  In addition to The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part One being a bad movie, it’s also an utterly forgettable one.  The transparent cash grab of splitting the final book in Suzanne Collins’ trilogy into two films has butchered the film trilogy.

Mockingjay is such a completely different book than that first two that I was always intrigued as to how they were going to pull it off.  What they did was spend most of the movie focusing on Katniss’ reluctance to join the rebellion and save most of the action and impact for the second half of this (which honestly I don’t know how is going to maintain any coherency after this slog).

Catching Fire was flawed, but not like this and it had a dynamite cliffhanger entry that you could have grabbed and run with full-scale into what is, essentially, a war movie.  Instead teen angst and large amounts of screen time for some of the series most uninteresting characters had me so lulled into complacency that by the time the were ready to actually start a film, I didn’t care anymore.

Jennifer Lawrence is good as Katniss, but there’s something off about her performance in this one.  Perhaps she couldn’t understand why these scenes weren’t extras on a Blu Ray and were actually populating the majority of the movie’s running time.

The first two hunger game films were roughly 2.5 hours.  That’s all they needed for Mockingjay.  Now what could have been a very cool trilogy that launched the careers of one of the best actresses working is now going to end with a thud.  Not even the most ardent fans of the movie are going to multi-watch this series bomb.
4.75/10