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.
