Cobbled together from a jettisoned fourth season of the Disney+ series The Mandalorian, the unmemorable The Mandalorian And Grogu hobbled into theaters this Memorial Day weekend. It’s the first theatrical Star Wars release in 7 years — incidentally, 2019 was also when the first season of The Mandalorian was released — but doesn’t arrive with the fanfare typically befitting an entry from the multi-billion dollar franchise. With 10 seasons of live-action Star Wars shows already available to stream at home, audiences understandably need to feel compelled to go out to the theater when there’s already so much to dig into on TV. Each Episode of the Sequel Trilogy, and even 2016’s Rogue One, cleared that bar but this cinematic adaptation of the saga about a helmeted bounty hunter and his adorable sidekick doesn’t pass the Knee-Crack Couch Test.
Picking up where the third season left off, The Mandalorian And Grogu finds Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his foot-tall companion Grogu working under Commander Ward (Sigourney Weaver) of the New Republic. She tasks the pair with finding Janu Coin (Jonny Coyne), a former Galactic Empire leader now operating as a crime lord somewhere on the dissolute planet Shakari. To get more specifics on his whereabouts, Ward consults with the Hutt Twins, descendants of Jabba from Return Of The Jedi who are looking for his son Rotta (voiced by Jeremy Allen White). With the help of streetwise food stand vendor Hugo (voiced by Martin Scorsese), the Mandalorian discovers Rotta is working as a gladiator in a fighting pit run by Coin and endeavors to free the slug champion from his proverbial chains of servitude.
The film opens with a bleary setpiece victimized by the same style of concrete mixer color grading that has plagued Disney’s live-action output since 2016’s Captain America: Civil War and disproportionally affected 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story. Thankfully, the rest of The Mandalorian And Grogu isn’t as dim and drab as its snowbound opener but it doesn’t exactly instill much confidence from the outset either. After the successful mission, The Mandalorian turns in a holographic bounty card to Ward, she hands him a new card for Coin and the movie’s titular pair scurry off for another adventure. From there, the main characters are shuffled around like playing cards flipping through a deck, hitting the barebones story beats required to keep things moving but doing so in dramatically inert fashion.
Like its corresponding series, The Mandalorian And Grogu has plenty of action scenes where “Mando” gets to show off his sharpshooting and hand-to-hand combat prowess; him stating “I try to avoid violence” at one point essentially counts as a laugh line. His fights with all manner of space aliens and Stormtroopers are undoubtedly the high points of the film, most notably a nocturnal skirmish with metal-brimmed assassin Embo. It’s a sequence that feels particularly indebted to Westerns like Once Upon A Time In The West and the “Man With No Name” Trilogy that inspired director and co-writer Jon Favreau when creating The Mandalorian. That the movie strings together several well-choreographed conflicts while avoiding Easter eggs and memberberries should be enough to put it in the “W” column as a Star Wars outing.
But like any suit of armor — even the protagonist’s beskar-crafted uniform — there’s always a weak spot, and the plotting and pacing of The Mandalorian And Grogu is undeniably its fatal flaw. There’s a narrative cohesion and sense of consequence missing from this movie that makes the proceedings feel perfunctory and dull. Nearly all scenes of dialogue simply feel like filler, akin to unskippable ads in between songs on the free tier of a Spotify membership. The closest Favreau and his co-writers Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor get to character development is with Rotta The Hutt but Jeremy Allen White’s voice work is so bland that the pathos lands with an intergalactic thud. As much as Baby Yoda mightily strains to lift the film up with the Force from his tiny hand, his precious efforts are all for naught.
Score – 2.5/5
New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Backrooms, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve, adapts a sci-fi horror YouTube series in which a therapist ventures into an otherworldly dimension in search of her missing patient.
Pressure, starring Andrew Scott and Brendan Fraser, follows General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Captain James Stagg as they face an impossible choice: launch the largest and most dangerous seaborne invasion in history or risk losing World War II altogether.
The Breadwinner, starring Nate Bargatze and Mandy Moore, finds a supermom switching roles with her breadwinner husband after she lands a Shark Tank deal and he struggles to adapt as a stay-at-home dad to their three daughters.
Reprinted by permission of Whatzup