The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2

Essential, and it finishes the story properly, which is more than most of these series manage. The assault on the Capitol is staged as an arena by another name: the streets have been rigged with automated traps by the same people who design the Games, so the final advance is a squad walking through a city that kills on a schedule, filmed by a camera crew embedded with them.

The sewer sequence is the most frightening thing in the series and the furthest the films ever go towards horror. The rest of the combat is deliberately unglamorous, with casualties that arrive without warning or music.

What it gets right is the ending, which refuses to be triumphant. The last significant act is not aimed at the enemy, and the film treats the question of who replaces a tyranny as the actual subject rather than an epilogue. The scene in the rose garden is the best writing in the series and Donald Sutherland plays it as a man telling the truth for the first time, which is the single most useful piece of groundwork the prequel then builds on.

The weak point is the love triangle, which the books carried better and which the film has to resolve on screen in a scene that satisfies nobody. Philip Seymour Hoffman died during production and his remaining material was reworked, including a letter read aloud in place of a scene he never shot. Watch it directly after Part 1; they were made as one film.