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This is Not the Way

I am not caught up with the series this movie is based on. I did watch the first season of Boba Fett Toy: The Show (before Disney literally made Boba Fett Toy: The Show) and liked it fine, but never bothered to keep up with it afterwards due to the second season’s much-publicized use of extensive CGI ghoul effects and the apparently increasingly insular nature of its references tying into Dave Filoni’s various Star Wars projects, in which I had no experience with or interest in. But The Mandalorian is by a wide margin the most popular of the Star Wars shows on Disney+, enough so that it has permeated the pop culture primarily through the marketability of its very cute sidekick character Grogu (formerly informally “Baby Yoda”). If Disney were to give any of those shows the cinematic treatment, it makes sense that that is what they would go with. And for parts of this movie, I would say that impulse proves apt.
For most of the movie however, it does not. The Mandalorian and Grogu is essentially a feature-length episode of the show and a good approximation of all that I have heard of its weaknesses over the years. A story heavy on plot and low on substance, over-reliant on poorly drawn action beats meant to look cool, and with a low-calory thematic structure that might be effective enough in the context of an ongoing narrative but lacks any momentum when applied to a singular movie.
Ostensibly it is a standalone story and it can be followed along with fairly easily without context provided by the series -though there is a fair bit of that in both characters and lore. The Mandalorian, or “Mando” (played by both Pedro Pascal and Brendan Wayne) is an elite bounty hunter currently working for the fledgling New Republic in the aftermath of the Empire’s defeat at the end of the original Star Wars trilogy, alongside his adoptive child Grogu, a force-sensitive alien (of the same species as Yoda). Here, the two are enlisted into a mission to rescue Rotta the Hutt, heir to the criminal empire of the late Jabba the Hutt, in exchange for information on Imperial war criminals. It’s an enterprise that takes them to a few different worlds and into convoluted machinations revolving around Rotta’s freedom and the true intentions of the Hutts.
This film began life as the fourth season of the show, but in the aftermath of the 2023 strikes it was reworked into a movie directed by Jon Favreau -Disney’s golden child and a frequent director for the series- and it very much feels like it. Its structure is notably inconsistent to other Star Wars movies, with no central throughline, but rather a series of connected though contained individual stories threaded together. As you might imagine, this throws off the pacing quite drastically. Each third act functions like its own narrative endpoint so that when the story continues it is cohesively awkward, and the movie itself as a result feels much longer than its one-hundred-thirty-two minute runtime.
And Mando, however he has been characterized in the show, is a fairly dull protagonist to have through these episodes. Apart from one brief sequence, his face is entirely hidden behind that vacant tin armour, which leaves little room for nuance or expression in Pascal or Wayne’s acting -the voice and body language having to do the heavy lifting and it is not the most engaging on either front. And while Pascal brings a modicum of personality to the voice, it is not paired much with dimension of character. Mando acts with an attitude of badass confidence and dispassionate stoicism masking that typical roguish heart of gold, especially where Grogu is concerned. It’s as textbook an archetype as this franchise gets, and the movie provides no space for depth in this. Grogu meanwhile exists primarily to be cute, and is a little more naturally endearing for this, if also not particularly defined beyond being a mild mischief-maker loyal to his adoptive father. The rest of the cast is little better, from Sigourney Weaver’s half-attentive role as Mando’s Republican handler to Jonny Coyne’s Bob Hoskins impression as a mob boss with his own name. The first Star Wars film in which humans make up a minority of the characters also prominently features Zeb, a fan favourite from Filoni’s animated shows, and a monkey-like alien voiced by Martin Scorsese of all people. Weirder though is the prominence of the Hutts, and Rotta especially -agile and muscular- who speaks largely in English which feels very odd, particularly with the voice of Jeremy Allen White who couldn’t be more disinterested. Rotta has the only vestige of interesting character development there but it is so poorly written (so much dry, repetitive talk of “being his own man”) that it fails to live up to even its own dull standards.
The Hutts look horrible -for as much as modern Star Wars replicates an aesthetic of the old series’ practical effects it can’t be bothered to do for these creatures what it does for Grogu and the quartet of alien mechanics who join the journey for a time and feel distinct and real compared to most of the other aliens and droids. It's not just the effects but the designs themselves. Several of these characters appear to originate in Filoni's animated shows -which had their own cartoon stylistic aesthetic that doesn't quite resonate in a more realistic medium. The presence of these lore-based elements speaks to the fan service proclivities of Filoni and Favreau -both better Star Wars nerds than storytellers. It's there in the gladiatorial match that Rotta is forced through where eagle-eyed fans will recognize the alien monsters from Chewbacca's game in the first movie, as well as all the New Republic's aesthetics matching the scrappiness of the Rebel Alliance despite them now being the emerging power in the galaxy. It all accomplishes its goal of looking like Star Wars without having to imbue it with any of the substance that makes the best Star Wars projects great. It's enough to have a Boba Fett toy fighting a bunch of bad guys in drawn-out action scenes so lifeless and dull you wish an imaginative kid were actually choreographing it.
In spite of all this there are sequences and ideas here that do work. And even a couple of the worlds are interesting. The opening set-piece, for its flagrant retread of The Empire Strikes Back, does a decent job establishing the sensibility of both title characters, and taken on its own a section in the film where Grogu is the focal point is rather nice and charming. This is by far the least ambitious Star Wars movie too, but that in of itself is not a bad thing -the universe could do with shrinking its scale back and it is refreshing to see a film concentrate primarily on the underbelly of this galaxy, even if it is entirely superficial. And the music by Ludwig Göransson is terrific, capturing well a spirit of lighthearted adventure the movie might have lived up to.
Were The Mandalorian and Grogu actually about something and designed more cohesively as a feature it might have made for something decent. But its hatchet-job structure is too apparent and though it gestures towards richer themes it is really only about Star Wars -which was true also of J.J. Abrams when he first started on the franchise but he (at least until his second film) had stronger, compelling characters. Perhaps there is depth to the Mandalorian and Grogu's world on Disney+, but it is not on display here, a weightless movie (in spite of all the Hutts) to keep the engine running on a franchise merely spinning its wheels.

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