★★½ (2½ out of 4)
This new “Star Wars” epic, the first in seven years, is less a major movie event than a flimsy extension of the Disney TV series that fell apart in its lousy third season. But this bizarro hybrid lets us see Pedro Pascal protect bewitching Baby Yoda on a giant IMAX screen so all is forgiven. OK, not all, since “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu” feels like Jon Favreau, who directed the series and the movie, glued together a couple of streaming episodes and sent them out to bring home the box office bacon. He didn’t; the movie was made from scratch on a $166 million budget. That’s low for “Star Wars.” The question is when Baby Yoda starts cooing like a pigeon, will you really care?
My guess is that family audiences, always in need of a distraction for kids, won’t mind a bit. And Grogu, from the same mysterious species as Yoda, is animatronic cuteness personified. Never mind that he is a 16-inch homunculus with wrinkled green skin, weird pointy ears, and three-fingered hands. He’s also around 50 years old, though still a child by his species’ slow-aging standards. We instantly love him.
Grogu is forever adorable, but only flashes of ‘Star Wars’ remain. The rest is faking it.
We’re also drawn to Pedro Pascal as Din Djarin, the Mandalorian bounty hunter who almost never takes off his cumbersome helmet. OK, he does show face, forcibly, in the movie and it’s a big effing deal. His warmly resonant voice does the lion’s share of the acting and does it remarkably enough that we totally believe the relationship he develops as Grogu’s protector and surrogate dad. But we knew all that already from TV.
It's a bonus for those who never watched the streaming series that you needn’t bother now. The plot spins around orders to Din from his boss Colonel Ward (the great, imperious Sigourney Weaver in a role that used to be referred to as thankless). Din and Grogu are ordered to rescue Rotta the Hutt, the trimmer son of jumbo Jabba.
The idea is to keep Rota from being yoked into gladiator service by evil Lord Janu (Jonny Coyne, from the Disney series). The New Republic intends to trade Rotta’s return to his twin Hutt cousins by coughing up the locations of fugitive Imperial warlords.
Rotta is voiced by Jeremy Allen White in a questionable career move after playing Bruce Springsteen and the Bear. But Favreau keeps the TV-style action coming, though the thundering score by three-time Oscar-winning composer Ludwig Göransson suggests heights the film itself never reaches.
Don’t get me wrong. There are striking effects— stormtroopers, robot attacks, dogfights in outer space, the whole “Star Wars” vibe trying to pretend it’s cannon. It’s not.
What I’m saying is that “The Mandalorian and Grogu” gets the job done as family entertainment without going the extra mile that might have made it something special. This is not an unusual happening in an era when studios milk their cash cows to the last drop. “Peaky Blinders,” “The Equalizer,” “Ray Donovan” and the new “Jack Ryan: Ghost War” have all gone this route without exactly lifting their particular franchise.
“The Mandalorian and Grogu” leans hard on the adorable Grogu and the tiny puppet is up to the task. Yet the film’s 60% barely favorable score on Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t bode well. Only 2019’s “The Rise of Skywalker” scored lower at 51%. Yet the craft of the film is undeniable, especially with the puppets from Tippett Studios. For Grogu, there are friends to be made with Anzellan aliens (basically, the people of Babu Frik from “The Rise of Skywalker”) that extend his need for family beyond his adoptive daddy.
For devoted cineastes, this new “Star Wars” may be remembered best for the brief appearance of a fast-talking, four-armed capuchin monkey and fry cook named Hugo, who runs a food stall. Voiced by the legendary Martin Scorsese, Hugo goes cold on Din when the bounty hunter pushes “Goodfellas” hard for info about the Hutt crime family. “Closed for the night, thank you,” says Hugo, slamming the door on the intrusion. And for a moment, this “Star Wars” offshoot has the rush of exuberance it could have used more of.
“Hugo” is also the name of a classic 2011 Scorsese family film—yes, he could do those too and artfully—that brimmed over with the pleasures of the unexpected. In “The Mandalorian and Grogu” the pleasures feel less organic than manufactured, more theme-park ride than actual adventure, something saleable like a plush toy, enjoyable for a moment and quickly forgotten. There are flashes of the primitive splendors that George Lucas created nearly half a century ago. But only flashes. The rest is faking it.