Star Wars: The Mandalorian And Grogu Review

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Published May 20, 2026 by Travis Johnson

The first Star Wars feature film in seven years is enjoyable enough, but the future of the franchise is still murky.

Masked bounty hunter Din “the Mandalorian” Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his cute as hell ward, Grogu (puppetry with a dash of CGI) take job hunting down a rogue Imperial warlord on behalf of the fledgling New Republic. As it turns out, the job is more complicated than it first appears, putting Mando on the backfoot and forcing the pair of them to fight their way clear of the mess.

That’s the plot of Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first theatrical Star Wars film since 2019’s divisive The Rise of Skywalker. It’s also the plot of several episodes of The Mandalorian, the Disney+ streaming series that preceded it. There’s no getting around it; The Mandalorian and Grogu plays like an extended episode. Whether that’s worth the price of a movie ticket is in the eye of the beholder.

This time around, the mission is handed down by Sigourney Weaver as Colonel Ward, so that’s fun. The target is a mysterious ex-Imperial named Coin. The Hutts, the slug-like alien crime lords who have been slurping around the franchise since 1983, have info on him, and are willing to trade it for the rescue of Rotta (Jeremy Allen White voicing the first Hutt with a Brooklyn accent), the son of Return of the Jedi‘s Jabba, from life as a gladiator. But nobody asked Rotta if he even wants to be rescued, and Hutts can’t be trusted…

Sound familiar? Of course it does, and therein lies the problem. Directed by series creator Jon Favreau, who co-write the screenplay with new Emperor Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor, The Mandalorian and Grogo is designed to go down smoothly. It’s both steeped in callbacks and free of connective tissue – no homework is required to plug into the fairly simple story, but extant fans will have fun doing the DiCaprio point-and-snap when the critters from the Millennium Falcon‘s weird chess set show up, or a bunch of Amani menace out heroes.

Which I did. There’s a lot too enjoy here, like Mando going Batmando in the opening sequence, infiltrating an Imperial base and slaughtering the hapless stormtroopers within. Or Martin Scorsese doing a voice cameo as a four-armed alien selling space kebabs. But while David Klein’s cinematography is spectacular and the whole thing is more polished than its preceding streaming series, it still struggles to justify its existence as a movie. This is just another job for Mando and company (which now includes Zeb from Rebels, who doesn’t add much), and the stakes feel incredibly low for a Star War. Mando’s not saving the galaxy, he’s just saving a guy… well, a giant slug-man.

This takes him a little under two hours and fifteen minutes, which does the film no favours. We should be barreling along into danger and excitement; instead, we plod sullenly towards the end credits. A near-silent sequence where Grogu potters around a swamp for a bit starts out charming and winds up draining; Baby Yoda may be the face that launched a billion in merch sales, so the desire to give him some spotlight time is completely understandable, but the film often doesn’t seem to know what to do with him.

Or Mando himself, for that matter. Forget character development or progression, we’re back to Season 1, with Mando the near-silent stoic and Grogu his plucky comic relief. They’re unchanged by the events of the film, and George Lucas‘ beloved Hero’s Journey is nowhere to be found. Normally that’d be a net positive as far as I’m concerned, but even that played-out meta-structure would have been welcome.

But this narrative timidity is endemic to Star Wars circa 2026. The franchise has become a setting rather than a story. It’s telling that all the recent Star Wars material of late – streaming series, comics, novels – fills in gaps in the existing chronology rather than pushing forward beyond Rise of Skywalker. Where do you even go now? What threat is big enough, iconic enough, thematically resonant enough, to build upon what has gone before? It’s an impossible challenge.

The Mandalorian and Grogu can’t even rustle up decent villains, offering us a pair of twin Hutt crime lords, a human gangster in the form of Jonny Coin’s Janu, and, for a more directly physical threat, alien bounty hunter Embo. It turns out that the latter is an artefact from Filoni’s The Clone Wars animated series, a revelation that adds nothing – he’s just sort of there until he isn’t.

And that’s the whole exercise, really. The film feels perfunctory. This happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, and eventually we wind up back where we started, with our little found family of two jetting off to their next adventure. Which, at a guess, will be back on Disney+.

For all that, if the appeal of Star Wars for you is just the fact that it’s Star Wars, you’ll probably have a good time here. The galaxy is a cool place to hang out in, after all. But that’s all we’re doing here.