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While supporting turns from Woody Harrelson as wisecracking alcoholic victor Haymitch, Julianne Moore in chilling mode as Alma Coin, Mahershala Ali as solid soldier Boggs and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman as insidious spin doctor Plutarch Heavensbee continue to give weight and plausibility to the rebels’ underground world, these are more or less cameos in a film whose twin poles are close-ups of Lawrence and thrilling spectacle. There are frequent close-ups that showcase Jennifer Lawrence’s extraordinary expressiveness like Katniss for the rebels, Lawrence is the film’s figurehead, not only its protagonist but also bearing the entire burden of representing its narrative. Although the film opens with a severely bruised Katniss croaking out her key line – “My name is Katniss Everdeen” – it is in the concluding section of the story that it struggles most to convey the emotion of that first-person voice, and needs it most. The novel trilogy hinges on Katniss’s first-person narration, which is dominated in the final half of the third book by her experience of pain both physical – she is strangled, shot and burned – and psychological. The equivalence of the corrupt government and the rebel leadership is central to understanding Katniss’s actions in the final book, which the filmmakers have adapted rigorously in terms of its Games-style set pieces – notably the eerie subterranean attack by mutants that forms the movie’s centrepiece – and its less cinematic character arcs. A reluctant soldier, she questions the violent intentions of the rebels, particularly the weaponry designed by her former boyfriend Gale with Q-like scientist Beetee. Her aim is pure revenge: despite all the horrors visited on her, it is Snow’s brainwashing of her Games teammate Peeta that finally pushes Katniss into action. The film begins with her taking the fight first to Alma Coin, the morally ambiguous rebel leader, and then to the Capitol itself. She has survived two iterations of the deadly reality-TV show created by President Snow as both substitute for and terrifying reminder of the civil war that tore the nation of Panem apart, and has spent several months literally underground, promoted as a figurehead of the rebellion against Snow and his ‘Peacekeepers’. In this concluding film, which adapts the second half of Collins’s third novel, Katniss finally shifts from passive participant to active protagonist. President Coriolanus Snow Donald Sutherland Plutarch Heavensbee Philip Seymour Hoffman