Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026 | USA | 132 minutes | Jon Favreau)
A long time ago, on a streaming service too not far away from your couch, Disney+ brought live-action episodic Star Wars content onto your television. The Mandalorian was initially a simple Space Western about a bounty hunter named Din Djarin roaming the galaxy taking prisoners for cash in the topsy-turvy aftermath of reconstruction that occurred after the Rebels blew up the Death Star (the second one), killed the Evil Emperor (the first time), and everyone waking up with a Yub Nub dance hangover to piece together a New Republic. A low-stakes weekly diversion, the motivating premise was that the title hero wore armor so cool-looking that no one could possibly care that Pedro Pascal’s face would almost never appear on screen. Soon enough, he flips from hunting a rascally Baby Yoda to rescuing him from nefarious Imperial fetishist creepers obsessed with his Force-sensitivity. Like the audience who adored the little creature (the magic of puppetry), he eventually adopts the little fellow as his foster son and they get up to all kinds of adventures together. Now, after several seasons of increasingly complicated lore involving cults, factions, conspiracies, and space swords, and the revelation that the kid’s name is Grogu, the pair have made the leap from streaming to the big screen, but unfortunately it’s hard to call the result a movie.
Instead, it’s like gathering in a theater to binge-watch a few episodes of a television show you’d kind of forgotten about in the intervening years since the last season aired. Not the worst idea in principle — watching fun stuff with other people who also like it is a thrill of cinema going — but the major problem with the Mandalorian and Grogu is that the episodes they chose to smash together to cash in on ticket sales aren’t particularly good ones, let alone very special episodes in terms of theme, development, or effects. As individual episodes of a TV show, these would be among the more forgettable. As a Star Wars movie, the collection is at the bottom of the pile.
On the bright side, director Jon Favreau (who co-wrote the script with Dave Filoni & Noah Kloor) cast aside almost entirely the mythology of the recent seasons, making the film a neutral entry point for new fans, especially younger ones. Everything is vastly simplified, likely in the hopes that parents will take their kids, those kids will love seeing Grogu doing silly things, and will get hooked on Star Wars. It’s not a terrible gambit, but the extreme degree to which the plot and script are catering to the shortest attention span makes for a gratingly long two hours.
Opening amid some stilted extortion among Imperial loyalists, the movie sets off with a twenty-minute action sequence. It’s kind of cool if nonsensical, but will thrill anyone who ever dreamed of seeing an AT-AT stretch the limits of “all terrain” by navigating a comically narrow and perilous mountain switchback. Soon, the titular bounty hunter returns to a seaside tropical airbase to claim his fees and draw another assignment. We learn that with his parenting responsibilities, he’s become more selective, choosing only to work on rooting out the villainous scum still holding on from the scattered Empire. This quest, for a commander whose face is unknown, will lead him, his little friend, and a CGI-animated Grape Ape pilot to navigate some slimy family dynamics in service of rescuing a wayward kid to extract some information. There are some vaguely interesting new planets and environments to visit, each building to a bigger and bigger CGI fight sequence mostly involving gross-looking creatures and/or robots.
The execution of the story is sloppy in service of simplicity. Villainous characters state their villainy so plainly that a neon sign expressing their motivations would have been too subtle. Flatly delivered dialogue is so direct and mind-numbing that the much-derided talk of trade routes from the prequels is Shakespearean in comparison. Throughout, characters repeat their nefarious motivations multiple times in nearly the same words over the span of minutes, as if the writers expect viewers to be distracted while scrolling on their phones.
Basic plot details seem to shift minute-to-minute as if re-writes were happening between shots. At one point, a New Republic commander played by Sigourney Weaver (one of the film’s few human characters to show her face, albeit while giving a performance that leaves no impression) gives Mando a brand-new spaceship as advance payment for a bounty hunting job. A few scenes later, she tells him she can’t pay him for the work he just completed. It’s not a huge thing, but it’s symptomatic of a shoddily cobbled-together continuity.
Worse, one of the pleasures of a mission-of-the-week format is seeing the hero figure things out through some combination of wit and charm. There’s none of that here. The Mandalorian gets an assignment to find a faceless someone or other, and going on no information beyond a location, stumbles into them in a matter of minutes entirely by chance. At one point, he tries bribing a simian-like cheesesteak street cart vendor (Martin Scorsese in his Star Wars debut!) for information, only to have it pointed out that there are posters all around him with that person’s face on them. Bounty hunting isn’t what it used to be.
I might be way out of the mainstream, but the stunning miscalculation of the film is just how much it overestimates an audience’s interest in Hutts. Rather than bring back or introduce any human characters, the plot pushes all of its chips in on squabbling power dynamics of a crime family of big, slimy, green worms best known for their patriarch having briefly enslaved Princess Leia into a metal bikini-clad figure of sexual awakening for an entire generation. If you thought that one big gangster worm was gross as a side character, just wait until you see a planet full of them! If the CGI addition of one in motion freaked you out in Lucas’s tinkered re-release of the original trilogy, you cannot possibly be prepared for an entire movie about these creatures, let alone Jabba the Hutt’s rebellious son who’s looksmaxxed his way into being a jacked, over-muscled, arena fighter working off his debts. Voiced unrecognizably by Jeremy Allan White, one can only assume he’s leveraging the work he put into having played another tortured wrestler with a menacing father in The Iron Claw, a movie that fewer people saw during its entire run than will see this one on opening night.
The core issue with the film is less the beat-to-beat plotting than that neither of our heroes are movie stars. They barely have any character traits, let alone the potential for development or growth. You’d hope that a feature-length film would be ideally suited for drama or overcoming conflict, but both headliners have been reset to blank slates, barely informed by several seasons of television. Din Djarin is by nature a man of few words, which minimizes Pedro Pascal’s voice acting, and the helmet means that his face-time is limited to a few contractually required minutes. With the stunt actors sharing top billing, it’s unclear how much time anyone spent on set. Grogu fits this Marvel/Disney mandate that these movies hinge on a plucky, mostly clueless child in perpetual peril as the primary plot device. He’s indeed very cute, but that’s a crutch best deployed in smaller doses. As the minutes tick on, is it so wrong for an audience who’s been watching for years to imagine that he’d grow into more than a stuffed animal? The little dude is adorable and will continue to sell tons of toys, but both he and the movie mostly seem to forget that he’s more than a stuffed animal until the plot absolutely requires him to remember that he’s essentially a superhero.
The film is both mostly harmless and also easily the worst Star Wars movie ever released. I loathed the dreadful ending of Rise of Skywalker, but at least it had characters and ideas, several that I wish I could forget. With Mandalorian and Grogu, I’m already struggling to remember anything aside from that Ludwig Göransson got to write a soundtrack with a sick techno-influenced space song for a grimy Blade Runner-style planet. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the splendors of Andor in terms of the dizzying heights that Star Wars episodic storytelling can achieve. As much as I understand that there should always be a place for kids at the Star Wars table, this is not the way.
Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu arrives in theaters on May 22 and will be on Disney+ before you know it
Images courtesy Lucasfilm.