Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2 (12A)
The biggest release of the Week is Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, another case – like Harry Potter, The Hobbit, and Twilight – of a book being split in two to extend the life of a popular movie franchise. Mockingjay Part 1 played like a dull, dark and drawn-out placeholder for this film; it felt like the director (Francis Lawrence) and his screenwriters were holding back on the action to fete us in an explosive climax in which heroine Katniss Everdeen would finally go toe-to-toe with her evil nemesis President Snow.
And to some extent that is what has happened. Snow has lost the support of the various districts of Panem and to try to regain position he lures the emblematic Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and her rebel cohorts into the Capitol for that concluding confrontation.
But the route is pocked with booby traps (or pods as they are called), making the movie’s narrative feel like a flat and expanded video game exercise. The best part of this odyssey actually feels like it belongs in another movie altogether. The unit is caught in an underground tunnel and attacked by a screeching mass of mutants with barracuda teeth and boiled-frog skin. This is genuinely scary.
Otherwise Donald Sutherland seems to be having a good time as the lip-smacking villain, but Woody Harrelson and Julianne Moore are wasted and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s departure is marked in the most mundane way.
Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans
The documentary Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans is about the making of the race car movie Le Mans in 1971. At the time McQueen had done The Cincinnati Kid, Nevada Smith, Bullitt and The Thomas Crown Affair, and he was the biggest film star in the world. He was obsessed with racing and he went to France thinking that he would be able to take part in the Le Mans 24-Hour Race and use some of the footage in a film of his own.
But the insurance company refused to let him drive; he began his film – called Le Mans – without a script; the director John Sturges, who had done The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven with McQueen was sacked, and one of the stunt drivers lost a leg in an accident. They shot over a million feet of film and ultimately the whole thing ended up as an enormous indulgence.
The documentary, which uses footage from the set of Le Mans, never gets in close to McQueen and seems more intent on perpetuating his “king of cool” legend than presenting a balanced picture of the star. The darker aspects of his personality – the drug talking, the wife beating, and the record levels of womanising – which have been covered in various biographies are not touched on at all.
Every Wednesday on The Right Hook, Philip joins George to talk movies and TV. Listen back to the podcast below:
