The Mandalorian & Grogu is the first Star Wars movie in seven years, since the critical misfire of The Rise of Skywalker, despite multiple attempts to bring different projects to the screen in the interim. The film started as the fourth season of The Mandalorian, the hit TV show that established Disney+ as a serious player in the streaming wars, but was condensed down by director-writer Jon Favreau and writer-producer Dave Filoni at the behest of Lucasfilm and Disney, who were rather desperate to get a new Star Wars project on the screen, no matter the cost.
I suspect that as the fourth season of The Mandalorian, we'd have seen more extensive tie-ins with the established lore, a return for key characters and a furtherance of the show's main story arcs. As a stand-alone movie that cannot assume anyone watching it has seen even a single minute of The Mandalorian, the film has to jettison anything that even risks being vaguely confusing to create a perfectly stand-alone adventure. The result is a film that takes no risks and, more than once, made me ponder if some of the dialogue, visuals and pacing had been created by AI.
The Mandalorian & Grogu is the safest of safe choices, a perfectly adequate succession of action set-pieces, daring captures and escapes, and choice deployment of nostalgia bombs to make viewers giggle because a character has dropped a key catchphrase or deployed a fan-favourite vehicle. The amount of bombast on display is sometimes impressive, and those complaining the movie feels like an episode of the TV series may need to revisit the TV show to realise just how relatively constrained its action set pieces could be. Here, unshackled by such budgetary considerations (though this is still the cheapest Star Wars movie since Return of the Jedi, adjusted for inflation), we get an at-times exhausting succession of gun battles, fights with creatures, fights with droids and, er, WWE-style pro-wrestling scenes with Hutts.
The sheer volume of action and CGI set pieces is there to disguise the thinness of the plot. The Mando goes to one place to rescue one guy and then goes somewhere else to capture someone else, but annoys some other guys who try to capture him etc etc. To mimic the TV show, dialogue is stripped-back but the writers confuse minimalism with triteness, with the film featuring some of the weakest dialogue of any Star Wars movie to date. Rotta the Hutt gives almost the exact same speech about being his "own man" (despite being a giant space slug, albeit an absolute ripped one, guy is shredded) twice, for no apparent reason. Virtually every utterance in the movie is either an intended zinger (landing with the accuracy of a drunk stormtrooper) or rote exposition. This may be the least-quotable Star Wars movie to date...which given the competition includes the prequel and sequel trilogies, and Solo, is really saying something. The lack of good dialogue is also a problem for the actors: Pedro Pascal is at least used to being taciturn and Sigourney Weaver is too much experience to let it throw her, but Jeremy Allen White has nothing to work with as Rotta and turns in such a flat performance it feels like placeholder dialogue. The colour grading is also poor, making this easily the flattest and least-dynamic-looking Star Wars movie of them all.
Still, there's something to be said for the straightforwardness of the film at a time when a lot of films seem to get tripped up on convoluted storytelling or lore density. There are some nods at other media - a bunch of the X-wing pilots from The Mandalorian show up, alongside Zeb from Star Wars: Rebels and Rotta himself from the Clone Wars TV show - but nothing too outrageous, and the film does not outsay its welcome, even if a couple of action set-pieces and an overlong recuperation sequence could have been jettisoned to make for a tighter movie. One thing the film does do well is further the characterisation of Grogu, who here is shown to be more capable of understanding the Mandalorian's instructions and is a lot more capable of undertaking his own solo adventures. He has more to do here than simply stand around looking cute, which is a relief.
Watched as a standalone Mandalorian adventure, this is perfectly serviceable. As the next great hope for Star Wars in the cinema, it whelms at best. But maybe after the commercial and creative misfires of Solo and The Rise of Skywalker, that's just what Disney wanted.
The Mandalorian & Grogu (***) might be the most serviceable slice of Star Wars yet made, a perfectly adequate way of wasting two hours that is rarely outstanding, occasionally mediocre, but mostly inoffensive. Young children may enjoy the film more for Grogu's antics. I would definitely wait on Disney+ for this one.
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