[5]
After a seven-year hiatus, Star Wars returns to the big screen with The Mandalorian and Grogu. Based on a television series you don’t need to watch to enjoy the feature version, the film features a loner mercenary nicknamed ‘Mando’ who takes odd bounty hunting jobs around the galaxy while simultaneously protecting and providing for his ward, ‘Baby Yoda’ — I mean, Grogu. Grogu is a mute, 50-year old infant with strong, nascent Force capabilities. The unlikely pairing of a merciless bounty hunter with a magical muppet baby is a beguiling one that sustained the TV series for two good seasons, and one very bad one. A fourth season was well through production when Disney decided to turn it into a feature film instead.
This is that feature film. Only it very much feels like a TV show, lacking the high stakes, streamlined narrative, and high level visual effects a feature film require. You can almost tell where one episode begins and the next ends in The Mandalorian and Grogu, which causes the film to feel like it’s ending a couple of times before it actually does — outstaying its welcome by at least twenty minutes. With this episodic nature and low stakes, the film struggles with pacing and momentum — the sort of thing for which we’d be more forgiving in a series of thirty-minute TV episodes.
The story is convoluted. Mando is hired by a rebel leader (Sigourney Weaver) to hunt down the last remaining Empire-leaning gangsters in the universe. After taking one down in the first fifteen minutes (arguably the best action scene in the film), he’s sent to the planet of the Hutts for help identifying his next target. The Hutts wants him to rescue their nephew, a muscular slug named Rotta (voiced The Bear‘s Jeremy Allen White), from indentured servitude on a planet that looks and feels like Blade Runner. When Mando and Grogu find Rotta, they learn the Hutts actually want to kill Rotta. Mando wrestles with what to do — deliver his bounty, or let him go?
The second half of the film centers on the fallout of Mando’s decision, with more episodic sequences involving other bounty hunters, various creatures to fight, and more Hutt drama. The film is plodding enough to be annoying, redeemed only in the final stretch when we finally get some vital character development out of Grogu. There’s a twenty-minute stretch in this film that is without any action and all about Grogu, and these are by far the film’s most compelling twenty minutes — the only minutes with any deeper meaning than surface-level serial adventure shenanigans.
In addition to the bumpy, scattershot script, the look of this film is not up to the franchise’s high standards. Everything is dark, desaturated, and blurry to hide Industrial Light and Magic’s shockingly sub-par (TV budget?) visual effects. The digital characters are especially terrible. Rotta the Hutt looks painfully ridiculous in every single shot he’s in, and Jeremy Allen White’s English-language voiceover for the character feels too casual. Don’t look to Sigourney Weaver to elevate the film at all — she’s only in a few minutes, and she phones in most of her performance. Top-billed Pedro Pascal is merely serviceable, providing Mando’s voice and showing his face only briefly. Brendan Wayne (grandson of ‘The Duke’, John Wayne) rightly gets second-billing for playing Mando whenever his helmet is on (which is nearly the whole film). The puppeteers who bring the remarkable Grogu puppet to life are at the top of their game. Ludwig Goransson’s score is chaotic and overbearing during action scenes, but more effective in quieter moments.
If you’re looking for a big event Star Wars movie that pushes the mythology into new places, this isn’t it. This is a much more quaint and cozy affair, more akin to the Ewok TV movies from the 1980s — something that’s mostly cute and for children. It has absolutely no connections to Disney’s infamous sequel trilogy or its myriad other Star Wars TV shows, which is frankly a good thing. It frees any interested audience from the burden of having to watch any of that prior stuff, which has earned a collective reputation of being lukewarm to terrible. If you enjoyed the first two seasons of the TV show, this is essentially more of the same, with just enough of the warm, paternal Mando/Grogu bond to sustain interest. For one viewing, anyway.
Directed by Jon Favreau (Iron Man). With Martin Scorsese as a four-armed monkey flipping burgers in a food truck.