NEW AT THE MOVIES: THE ‘HUNGER GAMES’ SAGA COMES TO A GOOD END

Nothing lasts forever except the “Hunger Games” franchise, yet here we are. Forever is over. “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2” brings the four-film saga of Katniss Everdeen and her revolutionary war to a dutiful, fairly satisfying if undeniably attenuated conclusion.

Following the lucrative “Twilight” template, there was simply too much money at stake here to prevent the third “Hunger Games” book in novelist Suzanne Collins’ trilogy from being halved. Three best-sellers therefore became four features, and many additional hundreds of millions of dollars will likely end up in the vault down at Lionsgate Savings & Loan.

In the first and best “Hunger Games” film four years ago, Jennifer Lawrence was like Peggy Sawyer, the Allentown, Pa., hoofer in “42nd Street.” With bow, arrow and hawklike gaze of

destiny, she went out there a youngster, but she had to come back a star, and she did. Put another way, Lawrence brought home the bacon and fried it up in a pan. In “Mockingjay — Part 2,” it’s more a case of her saving the movie’s bacon, period.

What can be said about the wrap-up? Mainly, it’s dark. Lawrence’s Katniss, out to assassinate the heartless yet elegant President Snow (Donald Sutherland), spends many brooding minutes of screen time in literal shadow. Accompanied by her best fellas, the brainwashed-butfeeling-better Peeta ( Josh Hutcherson) and how’s-my-hair huntsman Gale (Liam Hemsworth), Katniss mucks around in one subterranean low-lighting setting after another. Then, at one point, thanks to some pretty slick computer-generated imagery, she mucks around in a big hurry, as she and her fellow freedom fighters elude a rising tide of sloshing, flooding black oil. The only reliable source of light in “Mockingjay — Part 2” appears to be Sutherland’s beard.

The fascist Snow promises “a celebration of suffering” for Katniss and her ilk, and for better or worse, the “Hunger Games” saga has always taken the plight of its sufferers just seriously enough to make it stick. I go back to the very first sentence I wrote on these movies, four years ago: The hypocrisy at the heart of “The Hunger Games” is irresistible. Collins knew if she invented a wide enough variety of ways to die, all she’d need is a compelling conduit to decry the brutality. Voilà: Ms. Everdeen, the savior, the myth, the legend.

In “Mockingjay — Part 2,” which takes its time in the telling because there’s not a lot of story to tell, Katniss shakes the numb funk of “Mockingjay — Part 1” and resolves to end this thing.

It’s peculiar and sad to see the late Philip Seymour Hoffman appear in abbreviated handfuls of scenes as the games designer turned revolutionary. Stanley Tucci, meantime, comes back for a single bit, seconds in length. Yet he manages to end his brief appearance with the single most insincere smile his toady of a character has ever smiled. Bravo, maestro Tucci.

And you know what? Three-and-a-half-cheers to this franchise. “The Hunger Games” has completed its tasks well and met fan expectations. Now Lawrence can move on to the next stage of a career made financially possible by that threefingered salute to the Mockingjay and all for which it stands.

“Mockingjay — Part 2” ends with a coda so fraudulent-looking and sticky-sweet you wait for the moment when Katniss wakes up from her Lasse Hallström nightmare. But that sort of cynicism has no place in Panem, or in dystopian young-adult literature as a whole.

The more unstable the real world grows, the more young readers and their unashamed elders lap up stories, at once dour and stirring, about life after the apocalypse.