Review Category: Reviews

As the opening credits roll on Star Wars’ first feature outing since 2019, Reba McEntire’s lyrics pierce the darkness: “A single dad who works two jobs, who loves his kid and never stops, with gentle hands and a heart of a fighter,” hailing the return of a helmeted Pedro Pascal and baby Yoda – those two jobs being, of course, relentless bounty hunter by trade and emotionally tortured lone wolf by compulsion, a man so committed to stoic isolation that he somehow ended up the most devoted father in the galaxy.

At least, that was our original pitch for The Mandalorian & Grogu. In reality, Din Djarin and his green son’s return is accompanied by Ludwig Göransson’s excellent score, but we stand by our desired introduction.

The actual story finds our reluctant hero conscripted by the fledgling New Republic, who have decided that what their fragile galactic democracy needs is a beskar-clad gun-for-hire and his Force-gifted toddler to go and rescue Rotta the Hutt in exchange for information on an important target. On the way, they’ll face space gangsters, a gladiator ring, war criminals, and a giant water snake.

The storyline and pacing make it clear that this feature is just three episodes of The Mandalorian’s previously planned fourth season, stitched together for a cinema release. Despite that, we’re also happy to confirm that if you’ve never seen a single episode of the Disney+ series, you will be fine to follow along. Jon Favreau has been generous enough to treat the whole enterprise as something of a soft reset, accessible to newcomers but still loaded with Easter eggs for the devoted faithful.

Visually, The Mandalorian and Grogu is doing a lot. Perhaps too much. Favreau wears his influences proudly — the ice-swept opening sequence carries a satisfying echo of The Empire Strikes Back, and across its runtime the film nods appreciatively to Top Gun, Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now, and, delightfully, Gremlins, with additional flavours of the western, kaiju movies, and samurai cinema seasoning the whole thing. It’s a great mood board, except that none of it coalesces into anything genuinely beautiful. Favreau geeks out (visibly, enthusiastically, and at considerable length), but the film never quite achieves the visual poetry of the works it’s so clearly in love with.

Where the film does succeed technically is in its creature work. Grogu and the Anzellans carry that old-school animatronic warmth that CGI will never fully replicate, a tactile physicality that grounds the film and endears the audience. It’s one of the most deliberately nostalgic choices in a film chock-full of them, and it works well.

The cast is more variable. Sigourney Weaver appears to be operating under duress – an actress of her calibre deserves better than whatever she’s been handed here, and her scenes have the vaguely glazed energy of someone waiting out their contract. Elsewhere, Jabba’s nephew Rotta the Hutt is, against all odds, surprisingly lovable, though it’s worth noting that Jeremy Allen White’s voice has been so heavily processed that the casting barely registers. A brief cameo from Martin Scorsese as a Chef-inspired food truck-owning alien is, frankly, exactly as wonderful as it sounds.

The fight choreography is genuinely solid, the score is robust and inventive, and there are set pieces (particularly that aforementioned opening sequence) that remind you of the genuine craft at the project’s core. The wolf-and-cub structure gives the film a clear emotional throughline even when the actual plot refuses to provide one: the story, as we’ve said, is episodic and lacks the discernible beats that make a feature – which makes it all the more baffling when the film fumbles the one moment it should have been able to land in its sleep.

We’re talking here about the handling of Mando’s de-helmeting, which is given away like a free supermarket sample in the trailer. It’s a moment the series has always treated with near-religious gravity, and is here afforded roughly the same tonal weight as a scene transition. It lands with a jarring thud, the emotional architecture around it conspicuously absent.

For all its shortcomings, The Mandalorian and Grogu is nonetheless hard to resent. Made by people who love these references deeply, who want to share that love, and who haven’t quite figured out how to synthesise it all into something coherent, it’s simply too earnest a film to dislike wholly. As love letters go, it’s illegible in places. But the affection is real, and that counts for something.

 

 

When The Force Awakens arrived in December 2015, Star Wars was untouchable, but despite over $2bn at the global box office and the remaining films in the trilogy bringing in north of a billion dollars there was trouble ahead. Rogue One made a billion, despite a troubled production, while Solo hit the skids at the box office, and The Last Jedi divided opinion. With nothing on the big screen since The Rise of Skywalker in 2019, much rides on the success (critical and financial) of The Mandalorian and Grogu. Can it reunite a fractured fandom? No pressure then….

First, the good news. The film is a lot of fun, with dizzying action, on-point humour (there’s more genuine laughs than most comedies), memorable music and visual effects. The film skilfully builds the world Din Djarin and Grogu inhabit, Pedro Pascal is effortlessly cool as Mando, Grogu remains a charming addition to the canon, and Jon Favreau directs with a steady hand… so (to paraphrase our beloved Princess) surely we have everything we need.

Despite all of that, there are issues. The plot is paper thin, with little at stake other than the continued existence of our lead characters, while the leaders of the Imperial Remnant range from incompetent to underwhelming. The Twins (first introduced in The Book of Boba Fett) are the film’s main villains, secure in their headquarters on Nal Hutta and presiding over a menagerie of creatures (and there are a LOT of aliens in this creature feature, including a four-armed Ardennian chef voiced by Martin Scorsese). There are child-friendly jokes and brutal kill scenes right next to each other (Mando is a wrecking machine), while the action regularly flits from stunningly cinematic to scenes reminiscent of the small-screen streaming series.

Jeremy Allen White voices tortured teen Rotta the Hutt (present far more in the film than one might expect and speaking basic rather than Huttese), while Sigourney Weaver is very welcome but underused as Colonel Ward. Look out for a number of cameos from faces that usually reside behind the camera, and if the fantastic Zeb (voiced by Steve Blum) doesn’t make you want to go back and re-watch Rebels, nothing will.

Fun, visually impressive, packed with action, and coming after the substantial feasts of Andor and Maul – Shadow Lord, it’s probably the right film for the right time as we head towards the 50th anniversary. Let’s hope the fandom agrees.

THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU is in cinemas from May 22nd. 

A feel-bad horror film for any man who’s ever whined about being ‘friendzoned’ without considering the damage his unrequited, unfair infatuation has wrought. A relationship drama for anybody who’s ever been in one that’s just a little too intense. A profoundly uncomfortable account of one woman’s agency and individuality being stripped away to satisfy of a man’s ‘love’. Definitely not for cat lovers.

All these things are true of Curry Barker’s Obsession, a supernatural horror film that does for the friendzone what Get Out did for white liberals. Young Bruce Campbell slash Dave Franco lookalike Michael Johnston plays Bear, a man who definitely hasn’t seen that one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Unable to pluck up the courage to ask out long-time crush Nikki (Inde Navarrette), he cracks open the mysterious ‘One Wish Willow,’ and makes his, uh, one wish.

It immediately becomes clear that he should have chosen his words more carefully. Or, better still, wished that his poor dead kitty was still alive instead. Even so, Bear’s initial qualms don’t stop him from enjoying the spoils of his wish, and he’s able to ignore some of nu-Nikki’s quirks in the name of love. Stifling, toxic, co-dependent love.

Barker takes a simple idea and boils it down to its unpleasant core. It’s essential that Nikki’s turn is so abrupt and so very obvious, not excusing Bear of his outright crimes for a second. There’s one shot, soon after their restaurant date, which is simply done, but perhaps the most harrowing in the whole film. Similarly, her monologue about Hansel and Gretel deserves to go down in the history books (preferably in the page next to Mia Goth’s Pearl) as one of the greatest things a horror film has done in the last ten years. Never date a writer.

It’s easy to understand why Bear might be taken with Nikki though. Navarrette is a revelation in the role, constantly leaving the audience trembling in fear as to what she might do next. Often hidden in shadow and moving in broken, puppet-like bursts of unnerving activity, she’s a force of nature, turning on a dime between Deadite and doe-eyed Disney Princess. She’s the manic pixie dream girl turned nightmare, and Navarrette owns the screen for every second of her time. When she’s not on it? You’ll be terrified as to what she’s been up to in Bear’s absence. The key, of course, is that neither she nor Barker lose sight of the young woman trapped inside. The film’s most powerful, primal moments are those in which she emerges – the bleak reality behind Bear’s one wish laid, ah, bare.

Lee Cronin may have only recently unwrapped his show-stoppingly horrible version of The Mummy, but Obsession comes hot on its tail as a contender for most disturbing film of the year. It’s a supernatural horror film which relies on none of the usual cheap tricks. Instead, it builds an air of suffocating malignancy from its leads’ performances. We’ve trodden this path before, the silly conceit is grounded in raw emotion and good humour, making its thrills and spills feel, if not natural, then inevitable. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so horrifying; touching if it wasn’t so deeply upsetting. In that respect, Obsession is the ultimate anti-romcom.

OBSESSION is out in UK cinemas now.

After attempting to take his own life in one of its rooms, antisocial novelist Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) returns to the grounds of a supposedly haunted hotel hoping to make amends. Discovering a suitably bleak conspiracy, he’s at risk of crossing over to the other side himself when he’s locked in the nightmarish honeymoon suite where an ancient witch supposedly resides. A load of old hokum? Ohm is about to find out firsthand that sometimes things do go bump in the night.

The latest one-word feature from Damien Mc Carthy, Hokum is another cinematic oddity from the Irish writer-director. One caveat: Scott’s jerkass novelist starts out so thoroughly unpleasant that some might struggle to get past the film’s first half hour. To be sure, let him die in there!

When he returns to the remote Irish guesthouse, Ohm is alarmed to hear that hotel employee Fiona (Florence Ordesh) has disappeared. Blaming himself (she did walk in on his dangling body, after all), he lets himself into the honeymoon suite in search of answers. There, he’s confronted by ghosts both physical and metaphorical, and forced to reckon with manifestations of his own childhood trauma. Set in an isolated hotel during off-season and featuring a troubled writer in a haunted room, it’s a cross between Stephen King’s The Shining and Room 1408. There’s even a Pennywise figure in the rabbit-eared weirdo glimpsed in the film’s most unsettling scenes.

Well-trodden setup aside, Hokum takes an unexpected approach to the supernatural horror story. There’s plenty of black humour to be found within the hotel’s walls, but Mc Carthy largely plays the scares straight, setting Scott’s Ohm on a well-oiled rollercoaster of efficiently delivered scares. Given the unenviable task of playing an absolute asshole, Scott does great work, although the screenplay does tend to overplay his misanthropy a bit too much at times.

A welcome strain of black comedy runs through Hokum’s veins, making its segues into outright terror hit even harder. Its jump scares are too telegraphed in advance to land as they should, but its bizarro imagery keeps the blood nicely chilled.

HOKUM is out in UK cinemas now.