There are a few things that immediately come to mind when one thinks of The Mandalorian: Pedro Pascal’s titular bounty hunter darkening a doorway before all hell breaks loose; dusty, western vistas; and fantastic pulp sci-fi adventures. And, of course, the adorable, diminutive Grogu, who becomes Din Djarin’s ward and surrogate son — and the de facto mascot of this new era of Star Wars. It’s a series built out of cool images and watercooler moments, predicated on the idea of centering a show around a sleek set of armor (though not the original one) and pulpy sci-fi touchstones. But what was novel seven years ago feels stale now. And The Mandalorian and Grogu, Jon Favreau’s hollow attempt at bringing the bounty hunter to the big screen, falls short even of that epochal first season.
It’s clear from the get-go that The Mandalorian and Grogu, which takes place shortly after the third season of the Disney+ show, is attempting to recapture the lightning in a bottle of that first season. It does away with the confusing lore that was starting to weigh down the final season of the show, and makes a concerted effort to go back to basics: Mando and Grogu, going on standalone adventures across the galaxy.
The Mandalorian and Grogu brings Din Djarin and Grogu’s story back to basics — for better and for worse.
Their latest adventure comes courtesy of Ward (Sigourney Weaver, phoning it in), a stern leader of the New Republic's Adelphi Rangers who has enlisted Din Djarin to hunt down any remaining Imperial criminals. But his latest target, a mysterious warlord known only by the name “Coin,” sends him into the seedy criminal territory of the Hutts, who promise Din information on this warlord if he can rescue Jabba the Hutt’s son, Rotta (Jeremy Allen White), for them. This sends Din Djarin and Grogu on a dangerous, planet-hopping quest that has them contending with gladiator rings, fading criminal empires, and a surprising amount of swamp monsters.
It’s The Mandalorian at its most basic — all it asks of audiences is to know that Mando is cool as hell and Grogu is irresistibly adorable. Din Djarin darkens so many doorways, and shoots up so many bad guys in cool setpieces modeled after Jon Favreau’s best memory of watching a John Wayne movie, that you start to lose count. And Grogu eats so many weird things. But this back-to-basics approach might feel refreshing if it wasn’t also the movie’s biggest flaw. In attempting to cut all the excess lore and worldbuilding that the show was beginning to gain, The Mandalorian and Grogu lose all sense of stakes. The film, which is loosely structured around three vaguely interconnected adventures, feels more like Favreau and company smushed together three episodes of The Mandalorian together — and not even ones that were particularly good or important. It’s like a filler arc in the middle of the season, suddenly got a feature-film budget and IMAX format. But even the handful of striking setpieces can’t recapture the pulpy wild-west fun of those early-season episodes.
Rotta embodies a lot of what’s wrong with the movie, and its overabundance of cameos and Easter eggs.
But, oddly, The Mandalorian and Grogu is also steeped in Star Wars Easter eggs and deep cuts that threaten to alienate the average moviegoer — including your resident Star Wars normie (me). The combination of a stripped-back plot with random bits of lore designed to make Star Wars diehards do the Leo pointing meme makes the movie feel even more weightless. As many skeptics feared, The Mandalorian and Grogu is very much “Glup Shitto: The Movie,” with the biggest offender being Rotta the Hutt. Rotta embodies much of what’s wrong about Mandalorian and Grogu: deep lore that matters to only a select few fans, a one-note character arc, and an abundance of CGI for your eyes to gloss over. Worse, the stunt casting of The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White is negligible — his voice is put through so much voice modulation that he sounds unrecognizable, even though he speaks like he wandered into the voice recording studio off a random Brooklyn street. Mandalorian and Grogu hints at something of a found-family arc with Rotta, Din Djarin, and Grogu, but it feels underbaked because the movie doesn’t want to linger too long on any one aspect, at the risk of losing its adventure-of-the-week structure.
A lot of the film’s problems — the wooden dialogue, the weightless worldbuilding, the overabundance of CGI creatures, and the halfhearted pastiche — can be attributed to the script by Favreau, Dave Filoni, and Noah Kloor. The writer ’s-room approach may have benefitted Mando’s story when it was still on TV, but in The Mandalorian and Grogu, it makes the whole thing feel simultaneously overcrowded and undercooked. It’s less a movie than a collection of directives: come here for your cute Grogu moments, your cool Mando shootouts (which are notably pretty bloodless), and all the Glup Shittos you can count. It’s a movie by way of theme parks and video games — at its best, it feels like a series of cutscenes edited together, at its worst, it feels like one of those videos you half-watch while waiting in line for the next Mandalorian-themed ride.
The movie’s highlight is when it embraces practical effects and transforms into a Jim Henson movie.
The Mandalorian and Grogu is not without its enjoyable moments — Grogu may have been engineered in a lab to give you cuteness aggression, but by god is he cute, especially when he’s finally given the chance to lead the movie on his own. In fact, that’s when the movie is strongest, when it allows Grogu to step out of his sidekick/cute pet role and take the lead, in a practical effects-heavy section that feels straight out of a Jim Henson movie. But even this bright spot is not enough to make up for the dull tedium of the rest of the film — Din Djarin has barely any agency within the plot, and precious little character development that hasn’t already been explored on the show. And too often, both Mando and Grogu feel like passengers along for the ride on the same theme park ride we’re all stuck on.
This is a movie for Star Wars fans who have made the Cantina scene their entire personalities. It’s a CGI creatures extravaganza, offering distinct worlds — here, a cyberpunky crime planet, or a swamp planet filled with Henson puppet creatures — and action figures masquerading as characters, for you to imagine mashing together. Maybe that was the nature of The Mandalorian all along, but on the big screen, it’s all the more glaringly obvious.
