The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 (2014)

I've never been a fan of 'The Hunger Games' films. Having read the book trilogy a few years ago, the idea of having a film series based around the novels seemed like a good idea... Unfortunately, none of these films have lived up to the hype surrounding them. I walked into the cinema expecting something far better than the previous films, and by the end of the movie I was more disappointed than I have been with any other installment in the series.

As with the previous films, what felt like an hour of time was completely wasted at the start. The time is taken up by boring dialogue and meaningless, confusing conversations between characters that feel like they were written simply to extend the running time of the film and serve little to no purpose at all. The second half of the film begins speeding up, but even then the majority of the time given has been wasted on those 'does anyone really care' scenes from the previous films. Then there's the acting. In both 'The Hunger Games' and 'Catching Fire', Jennifer Lawrence's acting has been one of the few things in the movies that was actually done properly, when compared to the poor acting of the rest of the cast. In 'Mockingjay' however, Lawrence's performance is extremely overdone... Luckily some of the supporting cast manages to do a fairly good. Lastly is the fact that Mockingjay is being split into two films. It's common for a single book to be made into multiple movies (I mean, just look at The Hobbit), but the issue with Mockingjay is that the entire novel could have been adapted into a single film. As I said earlier, the amount of time wasted in this film is insane... The entire Mockingjay novel could have easily been into a 2 hour film if those 2 hours were actually spent properly.

Personally, I think this movie doesn't deserve the 7/10 rating it currently holds here. Unless your a 13 year old girl and/or really don't care about the pacing and acting in this film.... I wouldn't recommend it.