“The old protect the young and then the young protect the old. This is the way.”
If you are looking for a fun, self-contained, popcorn action flick, you could do a lot worse than Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian and Grogu. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this entertaining little romp in the Star Wars canon (though it has received mostly middling reviews). Fans of the television show will surely appreciate this one, even if there are no major fan service cameos (no Boba Fett, Ahsoka Tano, Bo-Katan, Grand Admiral Thrawn, or CGI Luke Skywalker) and there is no major lore expanded upon here. All things considered, The Mandalorian and Grogu is a pretty safe, low-stakes, stand-alone adventure that clearly reworks several plotlines that were originally intended for The Mandalorian Season 4 but if you are a fan of this era of Star Wars you just might get some delight out of it.
The film opens with a bang. Din Djarin, the Mandalorian (played by Pedro Pascal) is now explicitly working for the New Republic, hunting down Imperial remnants throughout the galaxy. He tracks down a warlord named Commander Barro (played by Hemky Madera) on a snow planet (is it Hoth?) in a dramatic, explosive, gunslinging raid complete with AT-AT and AT-RT walkers a la The Empire Strikes Back. He then returns to Adelphi Base where he reconnects with his New Republic contact, Colonel Ward (played by Sigourney Weaver). She uses a sabacc deck to identify key targets. Mando also links up with Zeb (the Lasat hero from the show Rebels who is voiced by Steve Blum) and he is given a new Razorcrest ship before being whisked off on a new adventure.
Mando travels to the planet Nal Hutta, the homeworld of the Hutts, where he meets with “the twins” (cousins of Jabba the Hutt). We first met them in The Book of Boba Fett series. They have information on an Imperial warlord named Coin but before they reveal what they know, the Hutts instruct Mando to track down their nephew Rotta the Hutt (Jabba’s only surviving heir) who is apparently imprisoned on the moon of Shakari, an urban Blade Runner-esque locale. The last we saw of Rotta he was kidnapped as a small huttlet during the Clone Wars, but now he has grown into a massive, muscular Hutt. Rotta (voiced by Jeremy Allen White) has been captured and forced to perform nightly in the gladiatorial arena for a shadowy figure named Lord Janu. Mando gathers local information with the help of a four-armed monkey-esque Ardennian street vendor named Hugo Durant (voiced by none other than Martin Scorsese!) As an aside: the in-universe connection here is that Hugo Durant (likely named after Scorsese’s film Hugo) is apparently the brother of Rio Durant, the similar character voiced by director Jon Favreau in Solo: A Star Wars Story. Mando tries to help Rotta escape, but Rotta feels validated by his gladiatorial fighting and he wants to be nothing like his late father Jabba. Of course, he doesn’t realize that Lord Janu plans to watch him die the following night in the ring in a “Dejarik” fight. But before long, Mando is also captured and forced to fight with Rotta in the gladiatorial ring. For Rotta’s anticipated last fight, Lord Janu unleashes waves of menacing alien creatures (many of which mirror the creatures in three-dimensional chess game in A New Hope known as “holochess” or “Dejarik”).
After an extensive fight sequence, an electrical mishap with one of the creatures allows Mando to escape and capture Rotta. But before he can return Rotta to his aunt and uncle, Mando learns that Lord Janu is actually the mysterious Imperial warlord, Janu Coin, he has been searching for. Thus, Mando decides to abandon the Hutt bounty and instead go straight after Janu Coin (cue an impressive compound break-in and heist scene to capture Coin). Later, after depositing Coin at Adelphi Base, the pace of the film slows a bit as Mando and Grogu retire to their hovel on Nevarro and reconnect with the funny little aliens called the Anzellans. But in the night, they are stalked by a dangerous bounty hunter named Embo (a Kyuzo bounty hunter with a low-brimmed hat from The Clone Wars series) and his wolflike anooba companion. Embo electro-shocks and captures Mando, dragging him back to the Hutts who are angry with him for not bringing in Rotta. They have now captured Rotta anyway where he is slowly being tortured and as punishment Mando is dropped into a swampy lake filled with swimming lizard creatures called Amani (this drop sequence is a nod to rancor battle at Jabba’s Palace in Return of the Jedi). Then Mando squares off with a massive Dragonsnake (a creature which previously appeared in The Clone Wars). But Mando is actually rescued by Grogu and the goofy little Anzellan creatures through the pipes in the palace. They all flee out into the surrounding boggy jungle, but unfortunately Mando is near-death after being poisoned by the Dragonsnake. So Grogu builds a little Yoda-esque mud hut for Mando to lie in and he ventures out in search of help, ultimately finding a croc-esque creature apparently called Gatori (voiced by Stephen McKinley Henderson) who looks a little like Sebulba from The Phantom Menace. Gatori rocks back and forth in a chair reminiscent of a fisherman on the Louisiana bayou, and he offers Grogu a mushy substance that will cure Mando of his poison.
In the final climax to the film, Mando and Grogu find Rotta’s abandoned overgrown gun-runner ship hidden in the jungle and they send it crashing into the Hutt palace leading to a huge battle sequence against scores of retrofitted droids from various eras (many appear to be suped-up droids from the prequels). Mando squares off with Embo, and Grogu frees Rotta who fights his aunt and uncle in a wild combat sequence that ultimately sees all three Hutts tumbling down into the water pit with the Dragonsnake. But Rotta is saved by Grogu using the Force. The twins are then violently devoured by the Dragonsnake while Embo escapes and a contingent of New Republic ships arrives (X-Wings and Y-Wings and so on) led by Colonel Ward (Sigourney Weaver), and several directors and creatives from The Mandalorian series playing X-Wing pilots (Debra Chow, Rick Famuyiwa, Lee Isaac Chung, Doug Chiang), as well as Dave Filoni as Trapper Wolf and Paul Sun-Hyung Lee as Carson Teva and others. The New Republic ships destroy the Hutt palace just in time while Mando, Grogu, and Rotta narrowly escape. In the end, Mando realizes he is part of the New Republic now and Rotta apparently joins up, as well (will he reunite with Ahsoka again in the future after she rescued him in The Clone Wars?)
If you like self-contained comic book-styled Mandalorian stories that do not pack themselves full of fan service cameos, you just might enjoy this safe little action flick. The performances are pretty much wooden (there is only a brief scene in which we actually see Pedro Pascal’s face, he is often doubled by Brendan Wayne, John Wayne’s grandson, as well as Lateef Crowder) and the plot is quite evidently a stretched-out arc from what would have been the fourth season of the show, but I tried to give this one a fair shake. There just aren’t that many interesting movies coming out in theaters these days and I was also fortunate enough to see the movie in theaters with friends who are Star Wars fans. In The Mandalorian and Grogu, it was interesting to see so much of Nal Hutta, the boggy homeworld of the Hutts that has been described in Expanded Universe novels, such as A.C. Crispin’s Han Solo trilogy. And there were some fun but subtle callbacks, like the “de wanna wanga” greeting Mando gives to Rotta (which is right out of Return of the Jedi), or the background droid cameo played by Anthony Daniels, or even the “Tippetts” droids (a nod to Phil Tippetts, the legendary animator on the original Star Wars trilogy). There is also some impressive use of old-style practical effects with respect to various vehicles as well as Gorgu’s puppet movements. It brings back fond memories of the original movies. To top things off, Ludwig Goransson’s score is extraordinary, with electronic motifs employed a la Blade Runner. But there is just not much at stake here, and the whole movie was evidently cobbled together from scripts that would have been used for the series. It’s vapid fun but does it make sense as a feature film? Perhaps not. At the very least I liked The Mandalorian and Grogu much better than some of the bland sterile prequels and certainly much more than the deservedly-reviled sequels.
Credits:
- Director: Jon Favreau
- Written by: Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, Noah Kloor
- Produced by: Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, Kathleen Kennedy, Ian Bryce
- Starring:
- Pedro Pascal…..Din Djarin
- Doubled by Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder
- Jeremy Allen White…..Rotta the Hutt
- Jonny Coyne…..Janu Coin
- Martin Scorsese…..Hugo Durant
- Sigourney Weaver…..Ward
- Steve Blum…..Zeb
- Shirley Henderson…..the Anzellans
- Stephen McKinley Henderson…..Gatori
- Hemky Madera…..Commander Barro
- Matthew Willig…..Hogsbreth (Coin’s horned henchman)
- Pedro Pascal…..Din Djarin
- Cinematography: David Klein
- Edited by: Rachel Goodlett Katz, Dylan Firshein
- Music by: Ludwig Göransson