Cast your mind back to November 2019, when a helmeted stranger with no name recognition walked into a dusty cantina on the edge of the galaxy. The Mandalorian arrived as something of an oddity, Star Wars’ first proper live-action television venture, built around no legacy characters, no famous faces, and not a lightsaber in sight. Just a lone gunslinger, a mysterious infant, and the vast, lawless Outer Rim.
A lot has changed since then. Legacy characters have crept back in, Pedro Pascal has become one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, and the show’s scope has expanded considerably. The leap to the big screen feels like a natural progression, though the series arguably reached its emotional peak at the end of Season 2, when Din Djarin tearfully handed Grogu over to Luke Skywalker. A slightly meandering third season did little to recapture that magic, and unfortunately this feature-length outing doesn’t entirely dispel that sense of drift either.
What it does do, at least in its opening half, is get back to basics with some confidence. Mando is reintroduced in satisfying fashion, emerging from shadow, drawling classic lines, and dispatching enemies with the kind of laconic cool that made the show such a hit in the first place. He’s now working as an official contractor for the New Republic, which pulls him into the orbit of a pair of Hutt gangsters desperate to recover their nephew Rotta, voiced by Jeremy Allen White with a thick New York accent and a chip on his shoulder about being a gangland nepo baby. Meanwhile, Sigourney Weaver brings welcome gravitas as the new character Colonel Ward, and Star Wars Rebels fan favourite Zeb makes his live-action film debut.
The Rotta subplot, however, is where the film first stumbles. While the broader Hutt twins communicate in gloriously guttural Huttese, their complaining nephew’s incongruous Brooklyn whining grinds against the tone repeatedly, dragging sequences out and leaving the film feeling, well, a little sluggish. Too often the action boils down to Mando fighting wave after wave of CGI enemies with little sense of genuine stakes.
Then, just as you’ve almost forgotten the second name in the title, the film shifts gear in its third act. The pace drops and Grogu quietly takes centre stage in a near-wordless bucolic sequence that is genuinely lovely, tender, unhurried, and a reminder of why audiences fell for the little green guy in the first place. The film leans on his cuteness perhaps a touch too heavily (the addition of several equally adorable Anzellans compounds this), but it never loses sight of the fact that he remains its greatest asset.
What it does lose sight of is forward momentum. For all its charm, this is arguably the least consequential chapter in the entire Mandalorian saga, lighter on narrative impact than some individual TV episodes, and thinner still than certain stretches of the much-criticised Book of Boba Fett. Director and co-writer Jon Favreau and franchise architect Dave Filoni play things remarkably safe throughout, which may well have been the intention after the bruising reception to The Rise of Skywalker. Perhaps this was never meant to be more than a gentle, uncomplicated adventure for younger audiences, which, as George Lucas always maintained, is precisely what Star Wars is for. On those modest terms, The Mandalorian & Grogu finds its way. Just don’t expect it to point anywhere new.
