When Disney premiered The Mandalorian alongside the launch of Disney+, it felt like a breath of fresh air for Star Wars. A live-action series that explored a cool new set of characters from an unexplored part of the galaxy, completely unrelated to the Skywalker saga. While the show remained fairly entertaining throughout its three-season run, it also started to feel like an excuse for showrunner Dave Filoni to play around with his animated Clone Wars and Rebels characters in live-action.
The excitement over the show has waned, which is part of the reason why it’s so baffling that the first Star Wars movie to hit theatres in over six years would be the film adaptation, dubbed The Mandalorian and Grogu. It’s coming off the wake of the disastrous Rise of Skywalker, a movie I’ve quickly and massively soured on since my mildly positive review when the film was released. The Mando movie is certainly more enjoyable than that aforementioned trainwreck, but it’s also one of the few things a Star Wars movie shouldn’t be: forgettable.
Taking place sometime after season 3 of the series, the film finds Mandalorian bounty hunter Din Djarin (voiced by Pedro Pascal) and his young Force-sensitive ward Grogu (or as many people still call him, “Baby Yoda”) now bounty hunting for the New Republic. Their missions have generally involved hunting down and capturing former Imperial warlords who went into hiding after the fall of the Empire. After taking down their most recent target, the duo are then tasked with a new mission: Rescuing Rotta The Hutt (Jeremy Allen White)–son of Jabba–who is being held captive in a gladiator-style arena. In exchange, the Hutts will provide intel on a hidden, unidentifiable Imperial warlord.
“The problem is that, while as great as it is that The Mandalorian and Grogu is a purely standalone adventure, it’s still unable to shake the feeling that this could have been several regular episodes of the show stitched together.”
On the positive side, the film does retain much of what made the show work to begin with. Ludwig Göransson’s score is still fantastic, and more surprisingly trap-heavy this time. Mando is still a really cool character, mostly thanks to Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder’s suit performances. Grogu is absolutely adorable, and one of the film’s best moments involves him teaming up with a quartet of Anzellans (the same tiny alien species as TROS’ lone highlight Babu Frik) to rescue Mando from a precarious situation. I loved the use of old-school puppetry for these cute little creatures, and the Anzellans’ tiny, raspy voices reminded me of side characters from Conker’s Bad Fur Day. The central father-son dynamic between Mando and Grogu still carries a lot of heart. Grogu really ends up taking center stage in the later half of the film and is better for it.
If a show makes a leap to the big screen, it’s usually because there is a story that’s too big for the small screen (barring the usual financial reasons). To director Jon Favreau’s credit, he maximizes some of the new IMAX-sized scale in certain moments, like the opening action setpiece in which Mando takes down several AT-ATs. The problem is that, while as great as it is that The Mandalorian and Grogu is a purely standalone adventure, it’s still unable to shake the feeling that this could have been several regular episodes of the show stitched together. Even the other action scenes in the film’s later acts, as cool as they are, just felt like empty spectacle. It’s all too safe.
It also doesn’t help that the story and a bulk of the supporting characters are mostly uninteresting. Outside of the hilariously bizarre visual of a swole Hutt, Rotta The Hutt is just plain boring. Star Wars has never been the paragon of masterful dialogue, but every single one of Rotta’s lines are just awful expository monologues, made worse by Jeremy Allen White’s flat delivery. For a character that’s supposed to be this hulk of an alien connected to an iconic character, Rotta just sounds like a regular guy from around the corner. Sigourney Weaver is serviceable as New Republic colonel Ward, but she’s barely in the movie to make any meaningful impact. Funnily, Martin Scorsese gives a livelier performance than both in an extended cameo as a shopkeeper that Mando repeatedly interrogates.
Your mileage on The Mandalorian and Grogu will purely depend on how much you still enjoy the show. The movie is fun, but ultimately, it’s inconsequential to the franchise as a whole. No part of it did I feel this was a story that needed to be told, or that any of these characters were going to make a lasting impact moving forward. If you just want a no-frills adventure, you’ll have a great time. If you’re hoping for something that would take the franchise to a deeper level, like Andor, don’t even bother. Regardless, this could have been better off staying on Disney+ as an original movie.
