While 49 years is an impressively long time for a franchise to last, Star Wars is approaching its half-century with less of a triumphant sprint and more of a sickly stumble. After the universally derided Rise of Skywalker closed out the already contentious sequel trilogy on a real low, what was once *the* marquee name in event cinema has been reduced to a cheap TV franchise in the intervening seven years. Its return to the big screen, The Mandalorian and Grogu, will not help. Basically a truncated (and terrible) fourth season of the Disney+ show, it is entirely devoid of even the most basic magic that Star Wars used to be able to conjure.
Picking up where Season 3 of the show left off, the movie finds Pedro Pascal’s Mandalorian, aka ‘Mando’ (his Din Djarin name from the series is never said here), and his endlessly loveable Baby Yoda apprentice Grogu independent from the main Mandalorian clan and taking on bounty-hunting gigs from the nascent New Republic. After his latest mission ends up with an Imperial holdout dead but no actionable information about his network gained, Mando is assigned a contract by New Republic colonel Ward (Sigourney Weaver) to do a job for a pair of Hutt crime bosses in exchange for their Imperial information.
The whole thing is extremely videogame side-content coded; Mando is given a job by person X, which takes him to planet Y, where he then needs to do task Z, which has its own branching sub-quests, all of it at a remove from any actually interesting central narrative. The grander politics of the Republic are barely even a footnote, so instead we’re stuck watching Mando rescue a good guy Hutt – this is Rotta (voiced by Jeremy Allen White), who is apparently familiar to viewers of the animated Clone Wars series – from some fighting pits before getting stuck in an entirely circular plot back on the Hutt homeworld.
As a Star Wars story, it’s less at war with itself than the unforgivably shoddy Rise of Skywalker plot, but the actors and characters here are vastly less interesting, so that’s basically a wash, and the visual downgrade from JJ Abrams’s vision to that of Jon Favreau is, frankly, staggering. For their faults, the sequel trilogy films still *looked* like the biggest movies of the year with their rich colours, lived-in locales, and grand vistas often shot on location. The Mandalorian and Grogu looks like a TV show, and not even a hugely ambitious one, all flat cinematography, washed-out palettes, and empty CG in place of Star Wars’s usual commendable commitment to sticking a bunch of fun weird masks on its extras. I was truly not prepared for how much of a visual atrocity a muscular, all-CG Hutt speaking basic, un-accented English would be, but it’s a viscerally unpleasant experience that Favreau really commits to.
This latter note is doubly annoying as the film is absolutely at its best when it commits to its puppetry. Grogu himself remains completely endearing, the particular silliness and weight of him being (for the most part) a wonderful animatronic a big bright spark in an otherwise deeply dreary film. The moments in which he’s hanging out with a gaggle of the Babu Frik creatures that were the best part of Rise of Skywalker almost turn The Mandalorian into a Laika feature and are the consistent high point of this story.
The action is weightless and repetitive, the story goes nowhere (I saw a critique elsewhere that you couldn’t spoil the film even if you tried, given how little of consequence actually happens, and that’s largely true), and even the music is only OK. Yes, Ludwig Goransson’s score, mostly lifted from the show, is solid on its own merits, but this is big-screen Star Wars, and to try to do that without some John Williams tunes, as it turns out, is a fool’s errand. Though it does have stiff competition in its immediate predecessor, I think this is the worst Star Wars film to date and, seeing as how its writer Dave Filoni is essentially in charge of the whole franchise going forward, it might be the project to turn a weary decline into a death spiral.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 