How many nails can we realistically drive into Star Wars’s coffin before it’s time to give up hope of resuscitation? Seven years have passed since The Rise of Skywalker’s feeble, conciliatory end to the sequel trilogy and the franchise’s subsequent shift to the small screen (sometimes excellent like Andor, sometimes bland like the Obi-Wan Kenobi mini-series). Any return to the multiplex, you would think, should feel declarative, maybe even bold.
Instead, The Mandalorian and Grogu merely stitches together what is clearly three episodes of the previously planned fourth season of The Mandalorian and calls it a day. There’s not a whiff of effort here. As a mid-season arc for the character of “Pedro Pascal’s sultry voice inside a metal bucket” and his tiny, puppet son, this might have been adequate, if uninspired. As a so-called feature film event, blown up to Imax with Sigourney Weaver roped in to deliver a few lines, it’s the dullest and most inconsequential Star Wars film ever made.
The franchise was at least on to something when they first introduced Pascal’s Din Djarin in 2019 as an emotionally stifled bounty hunter working paycheck to paycheck, with no real moral compass beyond the ascetic principles drilled into him by the Mandalorian cult that raised him (in short, the helmet stays on). It’s a tale as old as time, but it was charming still to see that stone-cold heart melt in the face of a 60-year-old, gurgling, Yoda-adjacent infant.
All that character development is now firmly in the past, and the film never even bothers to check in on Katee Sackhoff’s Mandalorian leader Bo-Katan Kryze, or any of the other people the series repeatedly told us were an integral part of this character’s world.
In The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first character of the title exists solely to feed the second character of the title snacks. When Din’s helmet is ripped off so audiences can receive their court-ordered five minutes of Pascal’s famous face, the fact that he’s once more violated his own principles bears zero narrative weight because there’s no one around to care this time.
Perhaps the film could have outweighed that lack of consequence with a breathless, old-school space adventure – only director Jon Favreau and his co-writers, Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor, have been tethered so long to the small screen that they’ve lost nearly all sense of what cinematic scale and pace should look like. Din and Grogu, now contracted by the New Republic to sniff out the last remnants of the Empire (the series and film take place between the original and sequel trilogies), are ordered by Weaver’s Colonel Ward to travel to the planet of Shakari to seek out a kidnapped asset.
Shakari is such a lifelessly imagined 1:1 of New York City that the first alien they meet, a four-armed Ardennian deli owner, is voiced by Martin Scorsese. There, Din encounters Rotta the Hutt, son of deceased crime lord Jabba (of “being choked to death by Carrie Fisher” fame). He’s a looksmaxxed, gym bro space slug who, instead of speaking in the species’s distinct, guttural tones, is now just The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White reading these lines for what feels like the first time in his life. It’s a completely dispirited performance, and an awkward contrast to Pascal’s work, which still maintains that ice-cold, charismatic edge where it can.
While the first season of The Mandalorian did well to Star Wars-ise western genre tropes – with Ludwig Göransson’s synths, each cascading note sharpened to a blade’s edge, doing much of the heavy work there and here – The Mandalorian and Grogu feels comparatively bored by its own allusions to gangster cinema. A smooth-talking kingpin hides away in a luxury compound that looks like a big Tesco, while the later emergence of a deadly hitman is merely a CGI replica of a character from Filoni’s own animated Clone Wars stories (as is Rotta).
And as much as little Grogu, with his fuzzy, twitchy ears and chubby-cheeked smile, remains a slam dunk on the cuteness scale, Favreau has reduced him here more to strategy than character – something to cut to when the characters have run out of things to say. What ingenuity there is in the practical puppet work is undercut by how often, and jarringly so, they force him to interact with fully CGI characters. With The Mandalorian and Grogu, Star Wars has lost all sense of wonder.
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Dir: Jon Favreau. Starring: Pedro Pascal, Jeremy Allen White, Brendan Wayne, Lateef Crowder, Sigourney Weaver. Cert 12A, 132 minutes.
‘Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu’ is in cinemas from 22 May
