Like many other people who grew up as nerds, I have a strong affection for “Star Wars.” However, as the years have gone on, that has wavered so much that I find “The Mandalorian and Grogu” to be the final nail in the coffin of a franchise that I once loved.
Going into this movie, I had very few expectations, and even then, I was completely underwhelmed. It is baffling to me that a franchise can make a show as good as “Andor” and then immediately turn around and make something like this.
For much of the runtime, I was sitting in the theater for what felt like years, watching Grogu do something that was not charming after the first time, and yet the movie kept going and going.
“The Mandalorian and Grogu” feels like a very bad joke at times. There are no character arcs throughout the entire movie; every single alien, person or creature introduced has nearly no life or anything to latch onto.
The main characters, Din Djarin and Grogu, are boring to watch and are completely lifeless.
It makes it worse because you can tell that Pedro Pascal just does not care at all, and the performance is just as lifeless as the movie is. It is hard to blame him, however, when the script is doing him no favors, and everyone else is just as bad as he is.
I would try to talk about the plot, but it is so paper-thin there’s not much to discuss. It centers on Rotta the Hutt, Jabba the Hutt’s son, as the Mandalorian and Grogu try to help him.
There are also zero stakes at all in the film. Never once do you feel like the heroes will be defeated or encounter anything that will best them. This is a franchise that famously has its heroes lose in “The Empire Strikes Back,” and it cannot be more different here.
What makes the original show so interesting is the fun ways it takes a very basic spaghetti Western plot and gives it “Star Wars” flair. The flair in this movie is just that there are some truly horrific CGI creatures for you to look at for a large portion of the screen time.
The film isn’t even fun to watch because everything looks so bad. It is one of the worst-looking movies that I have seen this year, with everything being shot on the volume (a piece of technology that puts the background up instead of a greenscreen), it looks flat and cheap, two things Star Wars should never be.
The action outside of the opening fight is poorly choreographed and lazy to watch. This leads to one of the film’s biggest problems: the pacing is absolutely horrid.
The movie is structured almost identically to four episodes of a TV show, so each time it cuts or transitions at the end of an action scene, there’s exposition, and it gets so hard to sit through.
The worst part of this is the Grogu solo segment, which runs 15 minutes but feels like an eternity. In these scenes, Grogu builds a hut, steals some fish, returns to the hut and then steals more fish. This entire segment is such a misfire and doesn’t work at all; it completely drags the film to a halt and makes the rest of it a chore to sit through.
I think if this movie were maybe not over two hours, then it could’ve been a lot better, but as it is, it is one of the worst movies released this year. Lifeless, boring, ugly to look at, the movie doesn’t have anything going for it outside of Ludwig Göransson’s absolutely electric score that might trick you into thinking the movie you’re watching is worthwhile.
2/10
