Directed by Jon Favreau | Written by Favreau, Dave Filoni, and Noah Kloor | 132 min | ▲1/2
When The Mandalorian series debuted on Disney + in 2019, it felt like a breath of fresh air for Star Wars. This was also the year of the final Skywalker saga movie, which I had some time for, but this break from the extended mythology on streaming brought the material back to an essential element — a self-contained space western largely set on a desert planet. It echoed everything from Lone Wolf And Cub to Gunsmoke to Sergio Leone, anchored by a too-cool performance by Pedro Pascal (and various stunt people behind the featureless mask) and a super-cute baby Yoda puppet, eventually known as Grogu.
After three seasons, and a Boba Fett spin-off, there seemed no reason to stop telling these small-screen stories. But in their infinite wisdom, the Disney company, which owns all these Lucasfilm intellectual properties, decided to make a Mando feature film.
What they’ve done, with the help of veteran actor and filmmaker Jon Favreau, is expand two or three regular episodes and throw them up on the big screen. That’s not necessarily a bad thing on paper — the show had a big budget and plenty of cinematic touches, if maybe an over-reliance on The Volume, the enormous digital screen that helps create environments in studio — it looks pretty fake if you know how to see it.
The problem is the TV show, which has a comforting, traditional formula, doesn’t work when you present it as a feature film. Expectations are different. There’s little character arc for the leads, little emotional progress for the characters, and small stakes.
We get plenty of action here, including an impressive opening where Mando (aka Din Djarin) and Grogu track down an imperial warlord on the outer rim. This is their work now, to use his bounty hunter skills to find the random Imperials and bring them to justice in the New Republic. His superior, Colonel Ward (Sigourney Weaver, and the film includes a brief salute to Aliens, IYKYK), assigns him a job find one of those baddies with the help of a couple of gangster Hutts, the giant slug aliens and relatives of Jabba.
The Hutts get him to track down their nephew, Rotta (voiced by Jeremy Allen White), who is working as a gladiator on another planet, paying off a debt.
But none of this is interesting. In fact, it’s deadly dull. I didn’t care about any of it, even when we get some truly impressive monsters, some of which are familiar from Star Wars lore — an albino dragon snake is especially creepy. But the opportunity to set up a fun heist structure is ignored as is the chance to bring genuine humour to the story. We get a few of the Anzellans, the tiny, chatty but largely incomprehensible mechanic creatures, which the movie treats like more-capable Minions — they squeeze out a couple of laughs, but not enough.
Also, at 2+ hours, the movie far overstays its welcome. At one point Mando is wounded, which might have offered some genuine jeopardy especially if they’d started with that and offered the first couple of acts in a flashback structure — this was the suggestion of one of my cinepanions. The filmmakers don’t do anything like that — what’s most disappointing is how little genuine creativity we get in the storytelling, making for a forgettable time at the movies. When this arrives on Disney+ as it will inevitably do, its chiclet will fit appropriately next to the show without distinction. You can watch it then, or not. It’s inessential.
