The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1, review: 'starved of action' - Telegraph The rebel leader, President Coin (Julianne Moore), makes air-punching speeches from a gantry, while the master spin-doctor Plutarch Heavensbee (the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) plans a series of viral propaganda films that will show Panem's increasingly restless masses that Katniss lives and is ready to fight. The Hunger Games franchise has always given its cast enough space between thrills to really let their characters breathe, and Hoffman's performance here is so contentedly, understatedly generous, you can't help but picture him having slipped his shoes off under the table. Early in the film, there is a beautifully played sequence in which Plutarch sits behind a special-effects desk, directing Katniss with mounting exasperation as she tries and fails to give a rousing woman-of-the-people speech on camera. Lawrence's appeal is so rooted in her knack of making meaningful connections with anyone she so much as winks at that it's doubly fun to see her character flub that task, and then later, out on the battlefield while being trailed by the guerrilla filmmaker Cressida (Natalie Dormer, from Game of Thrones, with a tattoo of a vine twisting up her arm to her half-shaved scalp), to suddenly feel words bubbling up inside her that she couldn't have mustered earlier, on demand. These trips above ground provide a chance for Katniss to be publicly seen, and raise spirits among the rebel fighters while keeping Capitol forces on the hop. For the audience, though, they represent periods of almost lung-bursting relief from the stifling, umber murk of the underground rebel HQ, where the vast majority of Mockingjay - Part 1 is set. Battle-ready: Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 A visit to a field hospital under Capitol bombardment leads to exactly the kind of panicked, panting action set-piece the film feels desperately short of, while another, more peaceful foray through the wilderness sets the scene for Katniss to sing a gorgeous, eerie ballad (The Hanging Tree, taken from Collins" book and arranged by the Colorado folk group The Lumineers) that wouldn't have sounded out of place in the Ozark cabins and cubbyholes of Lawrence's superb breakthrough film, Winter's Bone. Panem remains one of the most fascinating, vividly realised fantasy landscapes in the recent cinema, so it's a pity most of Mockingjay - Part 1 takes place around 300 feet underneath it. About all we see of the wider world are a couple of battle zones, a glimpse of a logging operation in one of the outlying districts and the various Capitol antechambers stalked through by President Snow (Donald Sutherland, lamp-eyed and lionfish, with a smile that could freeze blood). Fans of the books will know that the story is about to open back up again with a satisfying snap, which is foreshadowed here in a series of terrific scenes in which Stanley Tucci's oleaginous talk show host, Caesar Flickerman, hosts a number of stage-managed, Martin Bashir-like interviews with a certain contemporary of Katniss's, back from the dead. It's moments like these that remind you this blockbuster series" greatest special effect has always been the way it encourages its young target audience to engage sceptically with the uneasy love triangle between truth, power and entertainment. But Mockingjay - Part 1 feels a little short of all three. The Hunger Games - Mockingjay Part 1 is released on November 20