Starring Pedro Pascal, Jeremy Allen White, Sigourney Weaver, Martin Scorcese

Directed by Jon Favreau

Lucasfilm / Disney – in cinemas now

The Mandalorian and his apprentice Grogu are hired to rescue Jabba the Hutt’s kidnapped son, but all is not what it seems…

I was a total sucker for the Mandalorian TV series when it first hit our screens in 2019. I even survived having to accept that ‘Baby Yoda’ was actually called Grogu. I loved its Saturday Morning Wild West simplicity. However, by the third series the charm was starting to wither, and I confess to giving up on the show a couple of episodes in. So it was I approached the shiny new movie iteration with a certain  wariness. Could show runner Jon Favreau rekindle my irrational enthusiasm for a puppet only marginally more convincing than one of the characters from Michael Bentine’s Potty Time? Would a Big Screen Grogu bring a new magic to the Star Wars canon?

The answer is emphatically ‘yes’ – although I may be something of an outlier, as, aside from the original movies and one or two spin-offs along the decades, I generally find the Star Wars universe a one of science fiction’s more tedious franchises.

Aside from a sweet inversion of our expectations as far as the Hutt dynasty is concerned (with Jeremy Allen White providing the voice for Jabba’s son, Rotta) story-wise it’s mainly an overlong sequence of face-offs between Mando and an assortment of monsters, droids, over-sized robots, and the usual array of hapless, poorly trained Imperial stormtroopers (somebody teach them to shoot!!) with occasional interludes where Sigourney Weaver, as a New Republic commander, fills us in on a plot that frankly is neither here nor there. There’s a nice turn at the three quarter point where Grogu has to take charge, and a fabulous vocal cameo from Martin Scorcese as a four armed alien kebab monkey. But it all rolls along so merrily, only someone who has lost their soul down the back of the sofa could really dislike this movie.

It’s critical bad form to mention other reviews, but having read a few complaining about the inconsistent special effects, it feels necessary to put the record straight. The digital FX are flawless when they need to be, so when Favreau offers up set-pieces featuring crude potty-time muppetry, or jerky stop-motion animation, it’s because he’s writing a love letter to the franchise’s SFX history. It’s certainly a risky choice to mix techniques in this way, but for anyone old enough to grow up not just with the movies as they hit theatres the first time around, but with the technologies that underpinned them, it gives The Mandalorian and Grogu true cinematic soul.

Lastly a word on Ludwig Göransson’s captivating score. While his work on the TV series certainly helped lift the show to another level, here we have a depth, variety and unity to the music which both drives the action and successfully fuses its spaghetti western sensibilities with the orchestral bombast we have come to associate with Space Operas of this ilk.

Verdict: The Mandalorian and Grogu is a romp – overlong without a doubt – but never outstaying its welcome to the point where I stopped smiling and feeling like a kid at the movies on a Saturday morning. 8/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com