JENNIFER LAWRENCE, JULIANNE MOORE IN THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY - PART 1

Snoozing on the lead-up to the climax

Philip Seymour Hoffman helps set the mood of the third Hunger Games movie, appropriately since it's his last role, and soothingly for his fans since he is a benevolent, sweet presence here, balancing the strident tone of other characters in the series and nicer than he was in Hunger Games: Catching Fire. This reads as a transitional segment while the unfortunate exploited population of the District plan a full-on rebellion and the Capitol gears up to squash it. It's all build-up, really, and the central event involves one of the series' least appealing characters, the heroine's blah Ken doll supposed boyfriend Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), who gets brainwashed and turns weird. It would matter more if this happened to a character who had a personality.

Though there's been no lack of blockbuster expense on CGI grandeur, it's all muted and dark, the palette a range of blue-grays and gray-greens. We don't see much of the extravagantly absurd clothes and makup and accompanyingly kooky behavior of Hunger Games 1 and 2, mockingjay replacing popinjay. Practically the only sartorial (and tonsorial) peacock now is a distinguished thespian senior citizen, the 79-year-old Donald Sutherland as the snotty President Snow (whose hair is white as). This is, frankly, a pretty dull and drab blockbuster. Its mutedness follows partly from being a place-holder and the result of story mitosis. The filmmakers have split the third volume of Suzanne Collins' trilogy into two parts to make more screen time for fans and more money, and resultingly seem to have wound up sort of just breaking off this first half without a sense of an ending. It hasn't even been molded into a very good cliff-hanger. People wouldn't flock out to see it in record numbers were this not such a popular franchise and YA book series. And in fact even though this is still eventually going to make Lionsgate lots of money, in the US they're not flocking out for it as they did to for 1 and 2.

This lacks the personal drama and colorful scenes, but like its Hunger predecessors Mockingjay 1 is about ruling not only by propaganda and intimidation but by image (and, obviously, ritual). The "underground" District 13 led by its president Alma Coin (Julianne Moore) grooms the have-nots' plucky winner Katniss Everdeen (the charismatic Jennifer Lawrence, the series' main draw) as a symbol of rebellion, dubbed the "Mockingjay." (The mockingjay is an invention of the book, an avian hybrid created when the Capitol's spybird jabberjays mated with mockingbirds. But if this is explained in the movie, I missed it.) Why Katniss consents to be thus manipulated may be questioned, but everybody in Panem (which always sounds like a defunct airline) is just used to being a pawn in somebody's game. Besides she's suffering from PTSS. But that's another reason why Mockingjay 1 is a drag: a lot of the time the series heroine, its life force, just wants to curl up in a dark corner and try to sleep.

The drabness compared to Hunger Games 1 and 2 is an issue, obviously, but the real puzzler is why the scenes where Alma Coin (whose straightened hairdo resembles that of Meryl Streep's futuristic meanie in The Giver) harangues a virtually faceless mass of cheering District followers, who chant "hoo-rah! hoo-rah" like Marines, are as totalitarian as anything Leni Riefenstahl shot for Hitler. In fact needless to say, Leni would have done them better. But why should we root for a leader who is just as demagogic in style as her arch enemy and the people's oppressor? Whether or not they made any sense in the books or the previous film segments, the politics have gone all mushy and pointless here, reduced to gestures that make little ideological or tactical sense.

Anyway, this segment includes battles where Capitol forces wipe out a lot of Katniss' cohorts and best pals while they're on a mission to shoot a propaganda film and have to run for cover. (I wondered why the photog uses a camera with a little screen he looks down on, like today's cheap digital devices, instead of something more pro.) This is more boilerplate actioner stuff than in the first two movies, whose more unusual Games action was both dramatic and original in fun ways. This is a Hunger Games movie without Hunger Games. And though the body count is high and the loss is tragic, individual losses are not felt as keenly as the ones that happened earlier during actual Games episodes.

The adapters of Susanne Collins' third book keep the action simple and clear in this movie. But ironically so Many key details of the trilogy have been omitted by now, particularly involving development of the character of Dale (Liam Helmsworth) and key relationships among characters, not to mention the backstories of the various Districts, that to clear things up would require two more movies instead of one. Mockingjay 1 makes it look like all this franchise consists of is a gimmicky setup, and there is no way of resolving its muddled plot structure. More than one critic has commented that the highlight is Jennifer Lawrence's sotto voce singing of "The Hanging Tree," even though it has little to do with the plot. As Armond White writes, "her voice has an appealing country-western twang that suggests some folk-culture remnant is buried beneath the rubble of bones and clichés." Whether or not Part 2 brings a satisfying finale, Mockingjay Part 1 is an epic disappointment, but not really such an epic -- just a snooze.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1, 123 mins., premiered in London 10 Nov. 2014, and opened in theaters worldwide in November, US, 21 Nov. Metacritic rating 64%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.