Time: 132 Minutes
Age Rating: M – Violence
Cast:
Pedro Pascal as Din Djarin / The Mandalorian
Jeremy Allen White as Rotta the Hutt
Jonny Coyne as Janu Coin
Martin Scorsese as Hugo Durant
Sigourney Weaver as Ward
Director: Jon Favreau

I liked The Mandalorian, it was a neat little Star Wars show which unfortunately was running out of steam by the time season 3 finished. Whatever the solution was to that, I don’t think the answer was making the next instalment a feature film. I went into The Mandalorian and Grogu with a lot of scepticism. I came out of it enjoying it, but it’s certainly near the bottom of the Star Wars movies.

On one hand, I do like the film’s tight focus and straightforward and simple story. It also isn’t as nearly as heavy on fan service as The Book of Boba Fett or even season 2 of the Mandalorian. While it benefits from having watched the previous appearances of the characters, the film establishes itself in a way that you can actually watch the movie without knowing much about what happened before. There’s no moment in which it introduces a character from the show that you’re expected to know, nor does it jumpscare you with a horrific looking CGI Luke Skywalker in a vain attempt to appeal to the audience (again). So to that degree, I respect it for being restrained. That being said, the film still remains aggressively safe. Not that I was expecting it to be completely subversive, but it really remains within the bounds of its comfort zone. Once again, you get the dynamic between the two leads, and it’s just the two of them on another adventure. If it sounds like I’m oversimplifying things, I’m really not. It is so safe to the degree that the events of this movie are actually inconsequential. If a season 4 of the show was made, it probably wouldn’t reference the events of the movie, that’s how little things happen here. There are no arcs for its leads, nor is there really any development for them. The exception is one section in which Grogu has to do things on his own, which is something that the show never had before. While I quite liked that section, once it comes to a close, it just moves swiftly on and is never addressed again. The fact that the dynamic between the two hasn’t developed in the slightest over the runtime of this movie is honestly a little astounding. The only character who has some kind of depth is Rotta the Hutt. It’s not much, but he’s honestly the only character who has anything going on with them. Every other character besides its stagnant leads are generic, underwritten, or only has a few brief scenes.

So I went pretty hard on nothing of substance happening (story wise and character wise) in the movie. But potentially, this could’ve been a mildly enjoyable if inconsequential tv special. But even judging it as that, I don’t think it was all that good. TV movies usually feel like an extended episode stretched into a movie, but Mandalorian and Grogu felt like 3-4 episodes stitched into a movie. As said before, it does have a straightforward plot (which could probably sustain itself for just over 90 minutes) and while that is a positive for the movie, that is nullified by the fact that it’s 2 hours and 10 minutes long. It starts off okay, but by the halfway point, the length and the pacing issues are really felt. It’s also a movie that is jumping from one event right to another and while the show did that too, the story was split up into episodes to break this up. By the time the movie gets to its first hour, it feels really repetitive and dull. A tv special like that really only works if it’s speedy and breezy, and if it’s going to be this long it has to have some kind of substance, which this movie does not have. There are virtually no stakes, there aren’t even any emotional stakes. Things just sort of happen, and the dialogue blandly progresses the plot. The pacing is all over the place, going from speeding through everything, to taking its sweet time, mostly the latter. Even the actual ending feels like a shrug, a ‘insert climax here’ and at the end.

Pedro Pascal returns as The Mandalorian/Din Djarin, and of all of his appearances, this is probably the least amount he’s had to do character-wise. Since season 2, the character hasn’t developed all that much. The thing is that while the character has always been a masked man of few words, Djarin had moments of humanity and personality that shone through occasionally in the show, mainly in his scenes with Grogu. Those moments are virtually absent in the movie, and make him a very boring character. The only time he shines in this movie is a scene in which he does have his helmet off for a small period and it’s probably the most physically involved he’s been without the helmet, but he gets the helmet back a couple of minutes later. There is some neat voice work from Martin Scorsese in a couple of scenes. It also has the appearances of Zeb Orrelios from Star Wars Rebels, and a bounty hunter named Embo, both of whom make the most of their screentime. Honestly, Zeb (alongside Scorsese’s character) is one of the only characters in the movie that actually has some sort of personality that I kind of wished he was alongside the leads far more than he was. Sigourney Weaver has a few scenes, she really phones it in and her performance is flat, but to be fair there really wasn’t much for her to actually do here.

Jon Favreau’s direction really is a mixed bag. This movie takes The Mandalorian to the big screen, and this format emphasises both the strengths and weaknesses of its visuals and style, mostly the latter. I liked seeing the different planets, some of the locations look good. and there are times where it has some good practical sets. This movie does have solid animatronics, and it’s not even just limited to Grogu. However, the CGI ranges from looking okay to just being absolute blurry sludge. I think for the opening scene it is the most consistently good visually, but so much of the movie looks flat. The action is all over the place in terms of quality, occasionally its entertaining, and other times it looks flat out horrible (a particular sequence in an arena is probably the most egregious example of the latter). Ludwig Göransson reprises his role as composer thankfully, his score for the movie is top notch to the degree that it occasionally elevates the movie.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is a predictable, serviceable, weightless, and stretched out TV movie made for the big screen. However, it’s moderately entertaining, and it is elevated by the amazing score. I guess if you enjoyed the show you might enjoy parts of it, but this really didn’t do much for me.