The Mandalorian & Grogu was the first Star Wars movie to hit theaters since Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and it is the first movie to be based on a streaming series. The good news is that the movie is miles better than The Rise of Skywalker, and no one has to have seen the streaming series to enjoy the new movie.
There have been a lot of lackluster reviews of the new Star Wars movie, and it seems strange that the complaints are that the movie is “just fun,” like that isn’t enough. This is a Star Wars movie. This is a film series that started with the story following two droids around and watching what happens from where they happen to be. It’s about a farm boy who wants to be a fighter pilot, and then he becomes a Jedi warrior. This is a franchise where the films made Ewoks a major part of the third film.
However, starting with the prequels, the Star Wars fanbase has become quite insufferable in demanding only their vision be told in the franchise, and when the movies try to be fun, many fans who fell in love with this as children now want it to be super serious for them as adults. If you are one of those people, understand that I want my Star Wars movies to be fun first and foremost, and if it can bring something original, that is just icing on the cake.
This movie is a ton of fun, and that is where it succeeds. However, it doesn’t really bring anything new, and that is one of the biggest problems with The Mandalorian & Grogu. The film seems like an overly long mission movie, and it seems like every single fight scene is the Mandalorian fighting either aliens that look like monsters or robots and droids. The only fights that had him battling other humanoids were a bar fight and a clash with a fellow bounty hunter. The rest of the film was just a movie with him fighting monsters and droids, and it got a little old after a while.
The story sees Din Djarin, the Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal), and his foundling Grogu (Baby Yoda) hunting down Imperial war criminals. When he ends up killing his latest targets, he gets another job from a New Republic colonel named Ward (Sigourney Weaver). She wants an Imperial war criminal no one has any photos of, named Coyne, and the only people who can point them in the right direction are the Hutt Twins, who need the Mandalorian to rescue their nephew, Rotta the Hutt, the son of the late Jabba the Hutt.
Rotta is from Star Wars: The Clone Wars, where he appeared as a young baby, and now he is a grown adult, and the Mandalorian is asked to bring him back home in exchange for information about Coyne. However, the Mandalorian soon learns that Rotta is paying off a debt, and he doesn’t want to go back home because the Hutt Twins plan to kill him. The rest of the movie sees the Mandalorian try to save Rotta and then face the consequences of his actions.
The best parts of the movie, by far, are the Mandalorian’s connection with Grogu and the portrayal of Rotta the Hutt, which was nothing like I expected it to be. Honestly, when Jeremy Allen White (The Bear) began talking as Rotta, it threw me off guard, and now I want to see Rotta back in more movies or streaming series ASAP. He was fantastic. If you have never seen The Mandalorian on Disney+, you don’t need it to enjoy this movie, but this film does show how close Din is to the young Grogu. This relationship carries the movie.
There are also some side characters known as Anzellans, and they are all voiced by Shirley Henderson (Moaning Myrtle from the Harry Potter movies). These little creatures speak quickly, but it’s easy to understand them, and they are a riot, stealing every scene in which they appear.
At the end of the day, The Mandalorian & Grogu is a very fun Star Wars movie, and its Rotten Tomatoes audience score of 88% shows that most fans knew what they wanted when they went in, and the film delivered on it. However, it is a little overlong at over 2 hours, and it could have used some trimming. I have heard some critics comment that it feels like three or four episodes of the series, and I can see that, but that can be forgiven for bringing fun back to the land from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.