Blandest movie-going experience in recent memory

Rating: 2/10 (26 April 2015)

I casually enjoyed the first two films, but was not a major fan or anything like that. I thought they were watchable enough, watched them one time each, did not obsess too much about them and did not read the books; so, walking into this third film, I didn't have any sort of high expectations for where the story was going or what would happen to the characters - I didn't even remember any of the characters' names aside from Katniss, Peeta, and President Snow. I was just in the mood for some action. That's it. It's all I wanted. Just as long as there was some action in the movie, I would have been satisfied. But... this movie failed to deliver even that much!
There was only one scene, involving some evil attack-planes, that can qualify as a genuine action scene in the entire movie, but even that sequence was rather short - in fact, the most exciting moment in that scene (and the whole movie) was one they'd already shown us in the movie's preview trailer, when Katniss shoots her arrow at the planes.
The rest of the movie is just nothing but extended scenes that go nowhere, in which nothing much happens, dragged-out far longer than they needed to be. In fact, with our main character stuck in an underground bunker for most of the movie, almost all the action primarily happens off-screen. Whenever something potentially exciting happens, we generally don't get to see the action itself, just a bunch of people in a room staring at monitors.
The movie also had a big problem with feeling repetitive, continually showing us scenes that establish nothing except what we already know. For example, the first time Jennifer Lawrence wanders through the wreckage and rubble left behind by an attack from the Capitol against the innocent district-dwellers, we get the sense that the Capitol is bad and they do horrible things and that Jennifer Lawrence is sad; we get the idea. But then later on, she wanders through another scene of wreckage and rubble in another long-and-drawn out scene. And then we get yet another scene just like that! We get it already! How many times do you have to establish that the Capitol are the bad guys and that Jennifer Lawrence is sad? Hurry up and get on with it already!
But they don't get on with it. It just keeps dragging on and on until by the time the movie ended, I found myself asking: That's it? The movie's over already? Really? But nothing happened yet!
Without having ever read the books or knowing what's going to happen next, even I can tell that they did not need to split this chapter into two segments. Instead of this dull, unnecessary episode, I'm sure there's no reason they couldn't have just squashed all the events of this film into the first act of the final film.
What a disappointment.