‘Hunger Games’ runs out of steam at the finish line

“The Hunger Games” movies have unfolded in a relative blitzkrieg — four movies in four years — and in a fan-fueled fever that has masked some seriously silly political allegory with the thrill of survival games and the awesome star power of Jennifer Lawrence. In the final installation, “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2,” the game is over.

Having left behind the so-called arena  a wooded realm where teenagers from across the districts of the totalitarian Panem are set against one another in a televised kill-or-be-killed death match  at the conclusion of 2013’s “Catching Fire,” “Mockingjay” moves into a greater war in which Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), the reluctant participant plucked out of the mining region of District 12, discovers a wider network of like-minded rebels.


In “Part 2,” the march toward the Capitol takes on an air of inevitable victory as the revolution, led by President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore), contemplates power after the expected fall of the dictator Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland).
 Wary of replacing one corruption with another, an increasingly grave Katniss discovers the truth of an old maxim: Revolution is easy; democracy is difficult. Stretching the thin conceits of “The Hunger Games” into four films is even harder.

The pop pleasures of the early installments (the best of which was “Catching Fire”) are gone in the gray-and-gloomy second part of “Mockingjay.”

All the color and vibrancy of the series has been drained away, and a sizable chunk of action takes place in the sewer as Katniss and a band of rebels, navigating various traps, stealthily storm toward Snow with plans to assassinate him.