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'Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu' Review

Release Date: 05/22/26 [Cinemas]

Genre: Adventure. Family. SciFi.

MPAA: Rated PG13.

Distributor: Walt Disney Studios.

The Verdict: A Mistake


This should have been an email.


Since Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, Star Wars has struggled to find its footing. After a promising start that introduced interesting new characters, albeit in recycled packaging, with J.J. Abrams’ The Force Awakens, the series took a bold creative leap with Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi – a film that challenged both audiences and the prior movie by turning expectations on their ear and arguing that anyone can come from nowhere, and nothing, and still be great.


The Last Jedi made $1.3 billion and earned mostly rave reviews. But that was a sharp dip from the $2 billion haul of The Force Awakens and, far worse in the minds of studio heads, it created a divided fan base that turned into a scab that never healed. Disney caved. The next movie undid virtually all the bold and challenging choices forged by The Last Jedi, and the vocal minority of toxic Star Wars fans learned the worst possible lesson: if you bitch, they will cave.


From there, the franchise has mostly floundered. Andor is the lone exception that found creative, risky ways to reinvent inside the wheel. Most Star Wars content has filled in gaps between trilogies rather than break new ground. The other major exception, the absurdly and unfairly divisive The Acolyte, broke off 100 years before any of the films and was swallowed whole by the most toxic fans, killing any chance of expansion into a second season despite offering new and intriguing ideas.


Now, with The Mandalorian and Grogu, essentially a four-episode arc of a show that started strong and fizzled, Disney seems to have learned the wrong lessons again and handed the reins to the wrong people. Jon Favreau directed and co-wrote the film with Dave Filoni, with Pedro Pascal returning as Din Djarin, and Ludwig Göransson returning to compose the score.  

Favreau and Filoni have both made good-to-great Star Wars. Filoni mostly did it in animation, with The Clone Wars and Rebels. Favreau did it with the first season of The Mandalorian, which asked a simple question: What if a shiny Boba Fett and a baby Yoda met and went on fun, silly little adventures?


In recent interviews promoting the film, Filoni and Favreau have talked about the cantina scene from the original Star Wars being their favorite part of the franchise: that gritty, grimy, gruff little dive bar in a sad corner of the galaxy, filled with the most wretched hive of scum and villainy to ever cross Sesame Street. Not space wizards with laser swords. Not Akira Kurosawa for Western audiences, or Joseph Campbell for the matinee crowd. But the goofy transitional scene they exploded into its own three-seasons-and-a-movie universe.


At the outset of the film – the first Star Wars movie since The Rise of Skywalker ended the sequel trilogy with a blundering, reactionary thud – Mando and son are hunting down Imperial remnants for Ellen Ripley from Alien, Aliens, and Ghostbusters 2. Sure. Why not?

Mando kicks, punches and shoots his way through thugs, droids and Imperial walkers in the snow while Grogu blinks and looks cute as hell. That sets the tone for roughly the entire movie: fight scene, chase scene, wooden dialogue, cute scene, fight scene. Rinse and repeat.

The other major new character, Rotta the Hutt, is played maddeningly by multiple Emmy winner Jeremy Allen White in the most perplexingly dull and lifeless way possible. He’s the son of the fearsome space gangster Jabba the Hutt. But here he speaks English, and has abs and a good heart. That character – and much of the first half of this film – is some of the worst Star Wars ever set to celluloid, or television, or … pick a medium. It’s bad. Laughably bad. Insultingly, maddeningly bad.


Just when it threatens to become completely excruciating, a quartet of Anzellans nearly saves the day. That species was first introduced through Babu Frik in The Rise of Skywalker and looks like a cross between a wet stop-motion monkey and a pygmy Pepe the King Prawn. It shouldn’t work, but it does. And their interactions with Grogu are pure gold.

Weirdly, the lighting is incredible when it’s on the Mandalorian armor. That thing just pops off the screen and looks goddamned incredible in virtually every scene. It is basically the shiniest, coolest car ever.


Göransson’s score also works when it stays within the bounds of the wonderful, atmospheric, thumping, weird, analog TV-show theme. When it colors outside the lines and veers into techno, it gets confusing and incongruous with what should feel like Star Wars. Does that contradict the earlier point about trying new things and growing? Sure. Most certainly. Does the score work when Göransson leans into the strange, percussive language that made The Mandalorian feel fresh in the first place? Yep. Absolutely.


Virtually everything else about this movie is bad. There are more Hutts, lots of gangsters, stormtroopers, bounty hunters, and big and small monsters that want to fight and eat everything in sight, many of them too blurry to really make out. The exception is a giant dragon-snake monster that looks incredible onscreen and provides some genuine menace, and a creepy space wolf – because Filoni loves wolves. 


But the story is barely hanging on. Mando and Grogu save Rotta. His relatives get pissed. Mando and Grogu are separated and reunited, then separated and reunited again. There are several mid-tier fights, lots of embarrassingly bad dialogue, and the film ends with almost no character growth for its two main characters and zero advancement of the overall Star Wars story. Everyone ends up roughly where they started.


This should have been an email, or four average-to-bad episodes of The Mandalorian Season 4. And it will almost certainly struggle at the box office because toxic fans and a mostly lazy studio have let a once-special thing stop feeling special.


This is not the way.


 
 
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