THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU: Fun To Be Had (If You Let Yourself)
Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)
Screenplay by Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor
Based on characters created by George Lucas
Produced by Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, Kathleen Kennedy, Ian Bryce
Directed by Jon Favreau
PG-13, 2hr 12m
This is a Star Wars movie, and it’s a Mandalorian movie, and sometimes those two things are separate and apart from each other.
So, this film is the big screen continuation of The Mandalorian, the series that the Walt Disney Company used to sell subscriptions to the Disney+ streaming service. Would the show exist otherwise? Who’s to say? But in any event, the show delivered two out of three really good seasons following a Mandalorian bounty hunter who isn’t Boba Fett but probably started out as Boba Fett before they changed it because how do you explain Boba Fett’s return? (And then they did…)
The less said about the third season, the better, because the stories have it that Disney and Lucasfilm suits interfered creatively — firing Gina Carano and leaving only Baby Yoda to sell toys will do that — and with the return of Baby Yoda, rumor had it that Jon Favreau was effectively done playing in the Star Wars sandbox.
That proves to not be the case, as Favreau and Filoni return for this flawed, somewhat entertaining entry in the Mandoverse. Flawed, yes, but one must also consider that this particular film is not doing a lot of narrative heavy lifting likely for a reason. This movie serves to get Star Wars back on the big screen with a modest success, something the brand has been missing for a long while. (And no, numbers presented as “profit” aren’t always “profit” in the long run…)
So, anyway, the plot (without spoilers): after seeming to retire on Nevarro, in a nice little tw0-bedroom ranch with a nice kitchen, Mandalorian Din Djarin (Brendan Wayne, Lateef Crowder, and briefly Pedro Pascal) is currently working for the New Republic. His job is to hunt down and capture officers of the Imperial Remnant — no, they’re not called that, but they should be — who are listed in a deck of cards very reminiscent of the Gulf War deck (Saddam Hussein was number 168 in the Topps set) managed by Colonel Ward (Sigourney Weaver).
The opening action set has Mando hunting a particular nameless Imperial Warlord (Hemky Madera; see our interview with him here) who has set himself up as a regional governor of sorts, working a protection racket and opining that “the people” will eventually realize that they’ve lost important bureaucracy with the downfall of the Empire, and it’s only a matter of time before they want that superior logistical structure back in place. (Who made the trains run on time?) This hearkens back to the Extended Universe, when many former Imperials set themselves up as regional warlords and governors in the attempt to consolidate personal power in the wake of the Empire’s defeat. Because let’s face it: the Deep State bureaucracy is a thing even in fiction, right?
The bulk of the narrative turns toward Djarin’s mission to locate the “Ace of Staves” in the deck, Commander Coin — whereabouts unknown, appearance unknown — and he’s got to do a favor for the Hutt Twins (why do we never get their names?), who need him to head to planet Shakari and retrieve their nephew Rotta (Jeremy Allen White), the son of Jabba the Hutt, notorious villain and gangster thug who was defeated in the Star Wars movies that actually really matter.
I’m convinced that Weaver was brought in to replace the late Carl Weathers, as she performs essentially the same function he had during his run in the first season of the show: give Mando a target, pay him when the job’s done. The added layer that Djarin is now working for the New Republic allows for the addition of Rebels alumnus Zeb Orellos (Steve Blum) along with Carson Teva (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee), Trapper Wolf (Dave Filoni in a Favreau-induced funny bit that has now gone too far), and the New Republic’s Adelphi Base. Which bugs me a little, because on the one hand we get camera shots out of Apocalypse Now and Top Gun, but if Zeb is there, Chopper should be with him. And where’s the rest of the Ghost crew?
For that matter, where is Hondo Ohnaka? And if we’re dealing with the Hutts, where is the guy who took over Jabba’s operation on Tattooine? You know they guy. Boba something… and his side chick partner, Fennic Shand. Where are they in all of this?
Things quickly go sideways, as they do, and I won’t get into spoilers. But suffice to say that Rotta doesn’t want to cooperate, and what follows is the thematic crux of the entire movie: the relationship between fathers and sons. Rotta lives in the shadow of his father’s legacy, while Grogu is slowly learning to embrace his own. It’s a theme we’ve seen elsewhere in Superman: the son becomes the father, the father becomes the son. And here Grogu actually starts to take initiative and hold his own against his circumstances, even though it’s a sequence that I would have completely cut because it makes the entire film drag like it was stuck in molasses.
And I mean it draaagggggs.
The film is about fifteen to twenty minutes too long, and all of the Grogu stuff is what does it. I get why it’s there, especially in light of analysis elsewhere that puts a spotlight on “what do I do when you’re gone?” sentimentality that some kids are experiencing with their parents after seeing this story. But it bogs down the entire narrative, and while it accomplishes a neat little character arc for the puppet, it does absolutely nothing for the story itself. In fact, with a few judicious cuts in the script, I could arrive at the same destination with just a little more exposition and some much better interaction with Gatori (Stephen McKinley Henderson), who just happens to be in the right place at the right time and just happens to have that one thing that Grogu just happens to need…
And to be honest, you could probably do away with the Hutt Twins, too, for all that they drive the plot (they don’t, really). They’re a functional plot device to get Djarin from one place to another and drop him into the crux of a dilemma, but you could take them completely out and still tell the same story. Ward mentions an arrangement with them, and she hints that there are other forces at play with that arrangement, which Djarin short-circuits, but there’s never any development of that line of plot outside the scene where Ward upbraids Djarin. If it really, really matters that Djarin has to go through the Hutts in order to maintain some kind of pact or understanding with the New Republic, that idea needs more development than what we got.
And to address the 800-pound slug in the room: most of the dialogue from the Twins is in Huttese. The amount of Basic they speak is pretty much what we’ve seen in trailers and clips. I’d say about 90-95% of their dialogue is in their native language. You can’t say that for Rotta, however. He’s speaking Basic throughout the film, and however you may feel about it, there’s precedent. Jabba’s uncle Ziro the Hutt spoke Basic just fine back in The Clone Wars, so one can assume Jabba could as well, just arrogantly chose not to debase himself with such.
Regardless of how you feel about Hutts speaking Basic, the fact of the matter is that it doesn’t sound like Jeremy Allen White affected any changes to his own voice and speech patterns. Aside from the standard audio mixing to give his voice the traditional Hutt rumble in the bass frequencies, he sounds just like a regular schmoe off the streets, and that’s more distracting than his speaking Basic. That voice does not sound like it’s coming out of that slug, especially that particularly ripped and shredded slug. Having said that, White delivers an OK performance, but I think the casting is off. Not everyone has watched The Bear, and it feels like a bit of stunt casting or throwing a net over the current flavor-of-the-month actor making wine box soccer moms weak in the knees. I would have gone with someone like Christopher Judge or Lance Henriksen. Someone with some weight in the vocal chords.
Kudos to cinematographer David Klein, who not only evokes Apocalypse Now and Top Gun, but also gives us the planet Shakari wrapped in the style of Star Wars: Underground, the cancelled video game 1313, and a dash of Blade Runner thrown in for good measure.
Ludwig Göransson’s musical choices are … interesting. I’m not sure I would have made the same choices, even though I was initially impressed with his distinctive style in the beginnings of the series. But here, it feels like he’s using instrumentation for the sake of doing it, not because it’s the best option to support what’s on the screen. I know he has multiple Oscars at this point, but the techno tracks could have been used inside buildings in the 1313 Underground Shakari, but not as the film’s musical score. Best to keep the original idea that this is a Space Western, and Din Djarin in another reality is played by Clint Eastwood. Yes, in this reality he’s played most of the time by John Wayne’s grandson, Brendan, but the music doesn’t support the Cowboy. I won’t even talk about the final track that pays during the end credits, other than to say it was done before and better by Alan Silvestri and ZZ Top.
Most notable is the inclusion of Phil Tippett’s stop-motion work. The giant droids standing guard outside the Hutt enclave: watch them closely and you’ll see that those are not CGI, but physical stop-motion models. That plus the Dejarik creatures in one combat arena scene is almost worth the price of admission.
At the end of it all, I found that I was entertained, and I can recommend that you watch it, IMAX or no. Not so much for Mindy or James, but as a filmmaker and commentator, I can see what Favreau is trying to do with this film. He’s got to get Star Wars back on the big screen in such a way as to appeal to a broad audience, and that audience doesn’t necessarily have to include the die-hard Star Wars fans who are going around the internet saying “Star Wars is dead.” It’s a fun movie — yes, it drags in Act II — that doesn’t require homework to watch it, doesn’t end in a cliffhanger to force people to see the next one, and it will play well to families in that same four-quadrant space so successfully conquered by Project Hail Mary (which stars Ryan Gosling, who’s about to have his own Star Wars movie).
The film will also play well on Disney+, where it will lead people back to watch the series — at least the first two seasons. Like it or not, that’s going to be part of the calculus for every film moving forward. Because not every movie will be about selling Baby Yoda toys.
Who knows? Maybe one of them will sell Cara Dune merch…
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