2 out of 5 Baby Yoda Memes (has some good moments, but is overall bad)
When I was younger, my parents told me about a Brad Pitt film called Seven Years In Tibet that they claimed felt like being in a movie theater for seven years. I haven’t seen that film, but The Mandalorian and Grogu felt exactly like that to me. Sure there’s some decent action and its second titular character is plenty cute, but while Mando and Grogu were fighting aliens onscreen, I was fighting the urge to start Mandasnoorian in my theater seat.
Set sometime after the fall of The Empire, The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) is a bounty hunter working for the New Republic with his mischievous Baby Yoda creature named Grogu. A General (Sigourney Weaver) asks him to retrieve a missing son of alien crime family The Hutts, which Mando begrudgingly agrees to, finds the lad (Voiced by Jeremy Allen White), and then…. Goes from one video-gamey action sequence to another across the galaxy.
I went into The Mandalorian and Grogu ready to have fun and the opening action scene delivered, but the movie had revealed its best cards way too early. This was originally meant to be season 4 of The Mandalorian TV show before getting retooled into a film, and for me, it failed as both. The last trilogy of Star Wars movies was uneven, but all 3 of them felt like big-screen movies in their scale, stories, and characters. This movie sees a mostly emotionless action hero who makes a ton of cool poses and looks good firing a gun without giving you a reason to care about him and uses his sidekick for cute reaction shots. Lastly, Sigourney Weaver hasn’t been this underused since Exodus: Gods And Kings , but at least she gets to do something important here.
Star Wars movies should be an event, but this film made me think back to The Simpsons Movie joke where Homer points at the audience and calls us all idiots for paying to see something at the movies that we could have seen at home for free. I can’t speak for how The Mandalorian And Grogu will feel for its show’s fandalorians, but as a novice, it’s a series of video-game-like action sequences that may well be the cure for insomnia. If you like the show, wait for this to hit DisneyPlus. If you don’t and still want to see a space movie about a cool guy and his alien pal, Project Hail Mary is still right there.
Rated PG-13 for Sci-Fi Violence and Action