The Mandalorian and Grogu Probably Shouldn’t Have Been a Movie

Describing the production of the original Star Wars (1977), that film’s cast members liked to recall George Lucas’s most frequently used direction to them: “Faster, more intense.” At the time, it certainly seemed to work. Star Wars and its first two sequels were light-speed spectacles, their action and dialogue moving at a pace that matched their young audience’s excitement and enthusiasm. Watching the latest Star Wars movie, The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first feature film in the franchise since 2019’s contentious but lucrative The Rise of Skywalker, I imagined director Jon Favreau giving the exact opposite direction: “Slower, less energetic.”

Drab and stone-faced to a fault, The Mandalorian and Grogu struggles to capture the inventive vitality of the better Star Wars movies with action scenes that feel frustratingly pro forma and lifeless performances that seem determined to lull us to sleep. The key problem lies in the Mandalorian himself, the masked bounty hunter who has made it his duty to protect his tiny, Force-fortified pal, Grogu (an adorable puppet creature who was once known as “Baby Yoda”). Portrayed by a trio of performers — Pedro Pascal provides the voice and some of the actual acting, while Lateef Crowder and Brendan Wayne do stuntwork and other doubling duties behind the mask — the Mandalorian speaks in a disaffected monotone that is clearly meant to evoke Clint Eastwood’s tough-guy heyday. But Eastwood had one of cinema’s great faces; what made his calmness so electrifying was the stoicism of his delivery combined with the icy antagonism of his stare. (Try and imagine A Fistful of Dollars without Eastwood’s blue-grey eyes. You can’t.) Without a face and with the awkwardness of post-synchronized dialogue, the Mandalorian feels more like a vessel and less like a person, his terse words a technical convenience more than anything else.

A similar problem affects the film’s most significant new-ish character, Rotta the Hutt — the last surviving heir of Return of the Jedi’s infamous Jabba the Hutt — who retains his family’s giant-slug physique but adds some nicely swollen muscles to the gooey, slithery package. The film’s plot kicks off with the Mandalorian being asked to help the current rulers of the late Jabba’s gangster empire locate Rotta, who has been kidnapped; in exchange, the Hutts will help the New Republic locate an elusive renegade Imperial leader. The Mandalorian finds Rotta with minimal effort (the Mandalorian does most things in this movie with minimal effort), only to discover that Rotta doesn’t want to leave: His sojourn as a slave gladiator has helped him break free of his dead father’s criminal past. Rotta’s voice allegedly belongs to The Bear star Jeremy Allen White. I say “allegedly” because not only does his voice not sound like White’s (it has clearly been processed to sound slower and lower), it also retains none of the actor’s characteristically haunted delivery, thus rendering the casting pointless. Between the Mandalorian’s stiffness and Rotta’s torpor, we may wonder why we ourselves are supposed to care about anything that’s happening onscreen.

A similarly lackluster vibe blights the film’s action scenes, which are proficiently choreographed but rarely raise the pulse. The Mandalorian basically marches through these sequences, somehow entering highly fortified locations without meaningful resistance and dispatching all his adversaries cleanly and quickly. Again, without a face or sharp enough dialogue to muster any urgency — without any real sense of danger or rage or desperation or … or … really, anything — it’s hard to care one way or the other. There are occasional reminders of what this movie could have been. One enormous snake-dragon lurking in an underground lake is appropriately chilling, and it unsurprisingly gives the Mandalorian his biggest challenge. The creature designs are generally engaging, some of the film’s vistas have an otherworldly beauty (which is something Star Wars does excel at), and Ludwig Göransson’s unexpectedly New Wavey score is lively and charming.

Amazingly, the film is at its best when it really slows down: By far its most compelling part involves a strange mid-movie interlude when the action stops entirely and all we witness is the somber spectacle of one character taking care of another. I won’t give away what this actually entails, but it does allow the puppetry of Grogu to shine and briefly reminds us of the wide-canvas irreverence that Favreau (Iron Man, Jungle Book, Made) once seemed capable of. But then the segment is over, and it’s on to the next thing. The Mandalorian and Grogu continues the story of the Star Wars spinoff series The Mandalorian, and it often feels like several Very Special Episodes of a TV show stitched together. These characters will presumably return in another season of the series, but for now, the movie will serve as a placeholder and little else. As someone who happily watched The Ewok Adventure and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor on TV as a child, I can’t really fault any superfans, especially younger ones, for getting excited about it. But I can wish it were better.