The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu
½*/****
starring Pedro Pascal, Jeremy Allen White, Sigourney Weaver
written by Jon Favreau & Dave Filoni & Noah Kloor
directed by Jon Favreau

by Walter Chaw The Mandalorian and Grogu (hereafter ManGro) is awful. Was a time I would’ve simply ripped this movie apart, but there’s no real sport in it. It wouldn’t feel cathartic, just mean. If I spent much time talking about how ugly it looks, how poorly it’s written, how boring it is, I would be picking on something that couldn’t defend itself. Everyone sees that. The people who like it see that. It will have its admirers, because this product has been extruded for the maximum, frictionless comfort of its most vocal defenders. The ones who demand their entertainment validate their sense of who they are. If ManGro were a bath, the water would be body temperature; you’d scarcely feel it. What’s the point of picking on it? I figure if you’re watching this film, that’s two hours and change that I don’t have to worry about running into you. The problem for me, and it may be no problem at all, is that Star Wars is suddenly synonymous with those labels in our culture for things that are beneath contempt, as unworthy of respect as its naysayers have always insisted. It is the appendix in the body politic. The coccyx. They shout, “It’s for kids!” when a movie is unwatchable. There’s almost no way to be more dismissive in our culture. Now we can say, “It’s just a Star War” when a show is made for a niche audience of the pathetic and emotionally stunted. I still remember how angry I was after George Lucas came out in defense of his prequels, saying these movies were always “just for kids.” I’ve come to realize I was angry because I was afraid he was right.

This is why it disturbs me that, in ManGro, Bilbo Fett (alleged superstar Pedro Pascal)–a paid political assassin–is given an assignment via a futuristic playing card his Rebellion handler, Lt. Ward (Sigourney Weaver), hands him. “Commander Coin, our missing Ace of Spades,” she says. This is a callback to the 2003 Iraq War (i.e., the first days of the Forever War), where the US Department of Oxy-Morons created a deck of bounty cards identifying the top 52 most-wanted Iraqi leaders. Saddam Hussein was the Ace of Spades in that deck. His sons were the aces of Hearts and Clubs, with Diamonds reserved for Hussein’s secretary, Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti. We murdered them all. Why does the universe of Star Wars use the same kind of playing cards we use, I wonder, except to be able to make this reference in the franchise’s twelfth or thirteenth entry. Bongo Fett declares he no longer works as a hired killer for murderous gangsters, and Ward agrees, saying he now works as a hired killer for the good-guy Rebellion, as if this were a justification for his actions. The kid version of me, who held fast to the Tao of Star Wars’ light side vs. dark side dilemma, knew what side the bounty hunters were on. This bounty hunter, by the way, is redeemed, Road to Perdition-style, by also being a doting single father to Grogu, a primitive hand-puppet he treats like a dog with “heal” and “stay” and “come get a treat” commands. That’s not how you treat children. It hardly matters.

It also doesn’t seem to matter that Grogu looks like shit. Muppets were marvels: a marriage of marionette and puppet and, in many instances, featuring the performer’s own hands in the Oedipal, Santa Sangre armless-mother sense. Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back was alive to me. He didn’t look fake. He looked more real than Luke. The practical Yoda effect in The Empire Strikes Back wasn’t meant to be conspicuous. Yet Grogu’s design is obviously intended to draw attention to itself. It’s a joke that would never be mistaken for a living thing. The horrifying racist juju in Trilogy of Terror is more convincingly alive. When Werner Herzog said he was fascinated by “the baby,” I doubt it was because he thinks the baby is believable as a sentient being; more likely, he was fascinated that everyone in these fictions pretends it is. And then a good portion of the audience follows suit by pretending to be charmed by it. I thought about how I used to manipulate the arms and legs of stuffed animals and give them funny voices to entertain my kids. I thought of the disturbing miracle of the Catholic Host, too, where everyone in the cult agrees the wafer they’re eating is the literal flesh of another human being. If you tell them that “transubstantiation” is a serious thing in their religion (and, allegedly, it is long pork), they will smile beatifically and say you don’t understand that when they are committing cannibalism, they are not.

Grogu is the hypocrisy and delusion of transubstantiation for the worst of Star Wars fandom, plus non-fans who have made Labubu this generation’s pet rock. You believe in Grogu, or they kick you out of the cult. It’s a test of faith. Grogu looks and moves like Daniel Tiger from “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” not for a lack of budget or a paucity of talent, but as a sop to the most vocal of bros, who will opine loudly about what they want, even as their lives and obsessions are proof they don’t actually know what they want. Ultimately, what they want is for no one to Somewhere in Time them out of the time bubble in which they’ve hoarded all the oxygen. Watch how the little green fuck bangs on Baba Fett’s helmet to get attention, the way Punch used to drive kids crazy as he snuck up behind Judy with his bat. Grogu is alive only in the sense that he is a billion-dollar merchandising property, and Star Wars is defined more by its ability to move units of molded plastic than by great films. If they really want to print money, they should give Grogu a Corvette and a Dream House. Imagine you are an actor in the biggest sideshow on Earth, and everyone’s there for ALF chasing a cat.

ManGro is about the good guys if the good guys were the George W. Bush administration using playing cards to gamify war. I know that W.’s been absolved by painting folksy pictures and going to baseball games with Ellen DeGeneres, baseball-capped like a lab monkey Matthew Broderick smuggled into a Rangers game, but we used to know him as the absolute stupidest President of the modern era. As someone who, in our sweet innocence, we believed was such a dimwit that we would never see a less intelligent person in his position. W. is a lying warmonger and a racist, according to most everything he did and his closely held beliefs and his cabinet choices and also (not a reliable source, I grant you) Kanye West, who called him out on live television during a telethon for Hurricane Katrina victims. Have we become so jaded by six years under Mammon that W.’s foreign policy now seems like the birthplace of the Rebellion? Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the Filoni-verse is trying to catch a bit of that “Andor” magic by making ManGro an allegory for the criminality of American interventionism. I kid. ManGro is trying very hard not to be about anything.

An early side quest of this crude RPG unfurls on the Hutt homeworld of Nal Hutta. The establishing shots of Nal Hutta are awesome. It’s a network of slime-covered caves filled with gross tableaux soleolifera, and I was here for it. The coolness almost immediately dissipates upon the arrival of the much-feared “Twins,” who show our hero a picture of their missing nephew that’s just a fat little smiling slug, rotating in midair. I don’t know if it was intended as a joke, but it’s funny on several levels–the first being that it might not have been a joke. It might have been a serious plot point that Filoni and Favreau worked through as they laboured over their astonishing failure of a screenplay. Turns out that Rotta the Huttlet (voiced by the Boss–I mean, the Bear) is a self-loathing business major who dreams of becoming a sumo wrestler on a giant dejarik board and winning his freedom from…slave traders? Although he says he’s not a prisoner, he needs to buy his way to freedom. No one cares what I say, but please hire someone who can write to take a look at a draft of these things. Another pass or two through the typewriter could solve how the script is a collection of expository monologues, which Favreau breaks up with “business.” Business like Rotta feeding Grogu while he recites Ani DiFranco song lyrics about finding a room of his own in the world. It’s plotted like feeding time at SeaWorld. “Here he comes… He’s got it! Here he comes again!” ManGro doesn’t have a MacGuffin, it is itself the MacGuffin. It is a project both the filmmakers and the audience vigorously pursued for reasons that are at best arcane now.

We are at this point about 45 minutes into this 132-minute film. When people say critics don’t like movies, I point out that we not only finish but also spend more of our precious lives writing about bloated garbage like ManGro. Does a person who Giamattis a wine bar’s spit bucket hate wine? No, sir. No. Sir. That I kept watching for another 80-something minutes I could have spent with my family or masturbating is testament to my liking movies more than you ever have to like anything. Did I mention the part where Bali Fett rides a convertible AT-ST chicken-walker through the legs of another kind of AT-AT (LEGO set coming to a toy store near you) while being shot at, and the whole time he has a jet pack? It’s the equivalent of a hummingbird sprinting away from a pack of brontosaurs. The thing about E.T. revealing an ability to fly but not flying in the beginning to get back to his ship doesn’t bother anyone because E.T. is incredible. If you suck, you give the audience ample opportunity to consider the reasons why. I said I wasn’t going to do that. I do want to discuss Grogu giving an adorable military salute at film’s end: what is the takeaway there? Is he aping John John’s sober salute to his dad’s casket (no one of import has died), or is he saluting because it’s adorable and Grogu’s being positioned as a role model for the Team-America-fuck-yeah! militarization of the youth, even though the “youth” here is, much like the movie’s demographic, a fiftysomething child? “Your dad’s one of the good ones,” a giant mafioso praises our murder-for-hire guy to his adopted son as they bid each other a tearful but masculine farewell. Is it that simple? This government assassin is a good guy? You bet your shiny metal ass it’s that simple; what are you, a communist?

One set-piece featuring multiple hand puppets and puppet violence plays as if Charles Band had directed the Ewok sequences from Return of the Jedi. How is it that everything I’m describing sounds awesome, and yet nothing in ManGro is awesome? Well, because ManGro is part of an eternal second act written by the bad guys from ’80s teen comedies, who’ve never had to develop empathy. They’re the ones who like to say, “I was just kidding” or “It’s not so deep” when confronted by people in pain, since they themselves are not so deep. They’re afraid that pulling the thread of their introspection will unravel their fanatically held belief in their innate superiority in all things–their sole defining feature. Everybody knows that dry, pasty-ass crumbly cracker isn’t God except for you. But you do know, don’t you? You know what you are. Turning Scorsese into a monkey in your flick doesn’t make him wrong about those Marvel movies. Shoving the dad from “Kim’s Convenience” into his own cockpit for ten seconds doesn’t not reek of an “Oh shoot, do we have any Asians or Black people in this? Make them pilots” condescending, pacifying gesture to calm doubts and offer up a “See, it’s not racist!” Get Out of Moral Jail Free card for the dirtbags rushing to defend the indefensible. Go ahead, make the entire X-Wing squadron completely diverse (which ManGro does); I’m still not going to stop asking what happened to the Patty Jenkins Star Wars movie.

Careful, though, if you do tug at that thread. Start getting introspective, and before you know it you’re Newt in Aliens when Ripley takes a damp cloth to her face. “Uh oh, now I’ve done it,” she’ll say, “now I have to do the whole thing.” Under all that dirt you smeared over yourself to prove that you did some work, you’re a kid scuttling around in the ductwork. You are Navin Johnson’s horrified yawp: “You mean I’m always gonna be this colour?!” ManGro offers us limbo in the form of fog and self-denial. It’s a cloth dripping with chloroform, or the carousel at the end of Strangers on a Train: the conductor’s dead at his post and the ride’s spinning towards oblivion. Maybe it’s the carousel from Something Wicked This Way Comes that the barker promises will return me to childhood but renders me a skeleton dressed in piles of dust instead. Maybe it’s Carousel from Logan’s Run, and we should have died long before we took the reins of this culture to build a flytrap for our peers, poison-baited with saccharine nostalgia. Whatever the case, stop this merry-go-round, I want to get off. Hello? By all means, see ManGro. I’ll catch up with you in a few days when you finally get out. It’s the Jaunt, you see, a long time in real time. You must tell me what you thought as you’re ripping your eyes out on a gurney and giggling. Was your hair this white before you went in? Was it okay? Was it fun? Okay, but did your kids have fun?