One-Liners: Paranoia, the Destroyer

THE INVITATION (B+) - This unsettling psychodrama flies under the radar and sneaks up on you with a surprisingly crisp script that lulls you into a false sense of security.

Will and Eden split up a couple of years ago, torn apart by the death of their young son. Eden (Tammy Blanchard) is now remarried, and she invites Will (Logan Marshall-Green) and his girlfriend to a dinner party with a dozen or so of mostly mutual friends. Eden and her new guy have recently returned from an extended trip to Mexico, where they fell in with a Scientology-like cult called the Invitation. They play for the group a video of an ailing woman taking her final breaths as a prelude to engaging their guests in a conversation about the art of dying peacefully.

Eden and her beau speak robotically. She's dressed in a cliched flowing white gown, like Mother Nature from the old margarine commercials. Will notices that the front door is kept locked and there are bars on the windows. His paranoia quickly begins to spiral, making others uncomfortable and worrying his date, Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi). Is Will needlessly manufacturing dread in his head? Or is Eden up to no good?

To say anymore would, of course, ruin the powerful final 20 minutes, which are set up with precision by director Karyn Kusama ("Jennifer's Body," "Aeon Flux"). The main weak spot here is the cast. No one truly rises to the level of the material, as the 30-somethings start to blur together. This is ultimately a movie crafted around a really great idea and a memorable climax. Nothing wrong with that. It's to the credit of writers Matt Manfredi and Phil Hay ("Ride Along," "Clash of the Titans") that they took care to flesh out a full story and didn't just rely on a familiar director to ratchet up the suspense. The result is a pleasant surprise.

THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY, PART 2 (D) - This series peaked in 2013 with the second half of the second installment ("Catching Fire"), but it tumbled to an embarrassing conclusion with this blow-'em-up kiss-and-make-up mess of an ending.

Eight percent of this movie relies on two of the weakest elements of the drawn-out trilogy: battles scenes between the rebels and the regime, and the love story between Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson). Lawrence the actress seems weary here, and she and her co-star have zero (negative?) chemistry. It could be the small matter of Lawrence being one of the great actresses of her generation and Hutcherson having the charisma of a CPR dummy.

Nothing works here. A good 90 minutes finds Katniss and the rebels wending their way toward the capital. Would you believe that she defies all odds and manages to survive the craziest and direst of physical challenges? When the pack of CGI zombie jackals attacks -- and is improbably repelled -- it's laugh-out-loud funny.

With the flat-lined "romance" -- if only Katniss and Peeta could learn to trust each other again -- dominating the film, the balance is thrown off with the rest of the cast, the adults in the room, most of whom get reduced to tired cameos. Woody Harrelson, Elizabeth Banks and Stanley Tucci are afterthoughts here, trotted out merely for brief victory laps. Julianne Moore has never been so miscast as the rebel leader. The filmmakers seems to write around the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman in a few spots. No one here has a drop of gas left in the tank.

But like Katniss and Lawrence, viewers are worn down, fatigued by the bloated story. (This one runs 2 hours, 17 minutes; the end credits alone drone on for 11 and a half minutes.) This is the most violent entry in the "Hunger Games" pantheon; Katniss's final kill shot feels quaint and anti-climactic. By the time she releases that arrow, the plot has become so convoluted that it's hard to still care which side "wins."

This was a fine idea, but it was flogged to the point of incoherence. Not even Jennifer Lawrence can heroically rescue something this calculated and crass.

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