The Cinematic Adventures of Baby Yoda

The long-running Star Wars franchise added another movie to its ranks this past weekend with The Mandalorian and Grogu. And in my eyes, it's a strong contender for the "most OK" of the lot. Picking up on the three-season long television series The Mandalorian, the movie follows "Mando" on an action-packed adventure with the character people will always call "Baby Yoda."

The Mandalorian and Grogu is an entertaining movie. There are action sequences of seemingly endless natures and scopes. There's a surprisingly deep relationship between a character whose face you almost never see and a character whose face is rubber. Sigourney Weaver seems to be having fun, and it's kind of infectious.

But the fact that this comes after three seasons of television actually makes a huge difference. The Mandalorian has been around for years, bringing a lot of film-caliber action to our living rooms. The line between movies and television has never been thinner or blurrier than it is right now, yet the idea that a movie has to be "bigger and better" than a TV show persists. And so, to amp up The Mandalorian to cinematic size, they basically took what you could imagine as a "fourth season" of the show, and removed nearly all the quiet parts.

For nearly an hour-and-a-half, the movie bounces from one set piece to the next, deliberately leaving the audience with almost no time to catch a breath. Each sequence as an island is well-realized. Delivered as they were in assembly line fashion, I found myself getting a little numb to it all. Which is probably why I felt the best stretch of the movie was the 15-minute "end of act two" centered on Grogu. The pace relaxed, the stakes felt more personal, and character took center stage. Before, of course, an over-the-top final act.

Actually, it's probably not the shadow of three seasons of The Mandalorian looming over this movie for me as much as two seasons of Andor. It's not fair to now compare all of Star Wars to what I'm increasingly convinced is the best Star Wars there's ever been... but there's also some recency bias. Over the past several years, I've watched a lot of different "fine" Star Wars TV shows (and bad ones; looking at you, Boba Fett). I've accepted the tonal shifts between The Acolyte and Skeleton Crew. But when Star Wars is capable of being Andor instead? I understand The Mandalorian and Grogu wasn't remotely trying to be that. But also... most of me says, wistfully, why not?

Trying my best to set all that aside, I'd give The Mandalorian and Grogu a B-. I have a hard time imagining that it could ever be anyone's favorite Star Wars movie... or least favorite. But it's a serviceable action romp.