‘Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1’ counts down to box office cleanup

“The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1” is a mouthful of a title but most viewers, I imagine, will leave the theater feeling underfed, hungering for a lot more story that this second sequel offers.

It’s clearly setting up a grand finale – that would be “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2,” I presume – but Part 1 is all prologue and little else. If you enjoy running in place than this movie is for you.

If you’ve forgotten what place that is, or you’ve somehow avoided the first two films altogether, let me quickly recap: In a futuristic totalitarian state called Panem, the Hunger Games are a public spectacle in which randomly selected teens have to fight each other to the death. Only one can survive each year, and in the first Hunger Games movie, that was our heroine – Katniss Everdene. (There’s a complication here that involves a second winner but explaining that will just slow us down.)

In the second Hunger Games movie, Katniss finds herself having to go through another Hunger Games scenario – it’s sort of an all-stars version. This doesn’t sit well with Katniss and she (inadvertently?) attacks the entire apparatus of the Games.

In this third Hunger Games movie, she discovers a lot of underground support for her fight against the corrupt system behind the Games. But since most of the fireworks are being kept for the fourth and final Hunger Games movie, this placeholder of movie is mostly restricted to a couple of skirmishes. We’ll just have to wait for the real battle royale.

Perhaps because nothing much actually happens, the filmmakers work overtime to gin up suspense whenever remotely possible. One of their go-to moviemaking crutches is the “countdown.”

Everything always seems a little more exciting and nerve-wracking when we’re counting down, 10-9-8-7-6 etc., before something bad (or good) happens to our heroes. All action movies rely on this gimmick but Mockinjay goes to that well a little too often.

I kid you not, one of the most dramatic scenes in the movie involves the attempted rescue of a cat. Will it makes its way to safety before the bombs fall and the hatches close? Ten-9-8-7- … Oh my!

There’s so much downtime for the audience in this movie that I found myself wondering about all sorts of random things: Hey, there’s Philip Seymour Hoffman. I wonder how he’d feel about Hunger Games being his final film? And remember when Jennifer Lawrence used to act up a storm? Here she’s sleepwalking through the role, but then it doesn’t really call for her to do much more than that. Donald Sutherland and Stanley Tucci are both terrific villains and infinitely more interesting than our rather dull rebellion leaders. And gee, I wonder if Julianne Moore’s kids love the Hunger Games books, because why else would she agree to take such a dishwater role?

All my complaints notwithstanding, we all know “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1” is going to clean up at the box office. It’s an irresistible force of Hollywood nature and the countdown to blast off is already under way.

10-9-8-7-6-5 …