Seven years after The Rise of Skywalker, Star Wars returns to cinemas with The Mandalorian and Grogu, a film that feels less like a bold new chapter and more like three episodes of a TV show stitched together. The result, critics say, is the dullest and most inconsequential Star Wars film ever made.
The movie follows Din Djarin (voiced by Pedro Pascal) and his adoptive son Grogu as they are contracted by the New Republic to hunt down remnants of the Empire. But the character development that made the series compelling is largely absent, with Din reduced to feeding Grogu snacks and his principles violated without narrative weight.
Director Jon Favreau and co-writers Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor fail to deliver cinematic scale, with scenes set on the planet Shakari—a lifeless replica of New York City—feeling flat. Martin Scorsese voices a four-armed deli owner, while Jeremy Allen White plays Rotta the Hutt, a gym-obsessed space slug whose performance feels dispirited.
Grogu remains cute, but he is used more as a narrative crutch than a character, and the practical puppet work is undermined by jarring interactions with CGI figures. The film's allusions to gangster cinema feel bored, and a deadly hitman is merely a CGI replica from Filoni's animated Clone Wars series.
With The Mandalorian and Grogu, Star Wars has lost all sense of wonder. The franchise, which once found charm in a stone-cold bounty hunter's heart melting for a baby Yoda, now offers little more than a hollow, inconsequential adventure.
