A Mockingjay Too Far

Rating: 2/10 (22 November 2014)

I hesitate to add my underwhelming review to the rapidly growing list of IMDb User Reviews that are saying what this movie is - money grubbing at the box office with a franchise that already had a somewhat difficult premise to accept - youngsters fighting to the death. But this time the marketeers really did get the job done - Mockingjay - Part 1 - they have undoubtedly killed this series right there, Part 1 of 1.
It's difficult to find anything good to say, and the other IMDb Reviewers are already laying bare the faults: The movie just drags and drags, the plot is so thin and trite there really isn't any, if you've seen the TV previews you've already seen the only real action sequence, and the dialog is just awful. Long, lingering shots of the admittedly handsome young guys in the movie might appeal to 14-year old girls, but the rest of our audience - mostly Seniors - was seriously nodding off, even SNORING, way before this mess reached its agonizingly long run time of two hours and three minutes.
Interesting actors/characters - with the exception of saying goodbye to Philip Seymour Hoffman - are almost totally missing. President Snow (Donald Sutherland), arguably one of the more interesting characters, is almost absent, and Caesar Flickerman's (Stanley Tucci) appearances are little more than cameos. Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) without makeup and the character's goofy outfits/hairdos is hardly recognizable, and Haymitch Abernathy (Woody Harrelson) is left with so few memorable lines that none of us would have blamed him if he really had been drunk.
In summation, if you want to see Hollywood at its uninspired worst, this movie will git er done . . . if "Noah" didn't already.