Martin Scorsese shows up about forty minutes in four arms, bushy eyebrows, talking like he just stepped off a set in Little Italy and wandered into the wrong galaxy and for about three minutes, the movie becomes something alive.
He’s playing Hugo, an Ardennian fry cook with underworld connections, and he delivers every line with the coiled, fast-cadenced energy of a man who has spent his entire career studying how dangerous people talk in small rooms. He gestures with all four hands. He raises those eyebrows. He is, without question, the best thing in the film.
Which is either a wonderful accident or a quiet indictment, depending on how charitable you’re feeling.
I went into The Mandalorian and Grogu carrying the specific kind of loyalty that the Disney+ series earned from me over three seasons, the kind built on small moments rather than spectacle. A look held too long inside a helmet. A tiny green hand reaching up.
The way the show understood that restraint, in a franchise that had forgotten what the word meant, could be its own form of power. So I wasn’t expecting Lawrence of Arabia.I was expecting the show, bigger, on a screen that cost me more than my cable bill.
Here’s what’s happening: Din Djarin and Grogu are working New Republic contracts now, hunting Imperial remnants across the Outer Rim like a two-man cleanup crew for a war that officially ended but didn’t really. The film drops you into this mid-assignment, which is smart.
No throat-clearing, no crawl of exposition trying to catch you up. An ice-planet battle opens things with the kind of precise, contained action that Favreau has always been better at than he’s given credit for every punch and blaster shot has weight, stakes you can follow, a geography that doesn’t dissolve into pure digital noise.
Then Sigourney Weaver walks in, and I thought: here we go.
She plays Colonel Ward, a Rebellion veteran turned New Republic officer who dispatches our duo on their next job, recover Rotta the Hutt, Jabba’s son, from a criminal underworld planet, and in exchange the Hutt clan will give up intelligence on a high-value Imperial target. Weaver has the posture of someone who has fought wars and survived them and is still fighting anyway.
She brings that gravity without being asked to. But the film barely asks her anything. She barks orders. She stands in rooms. She exists, largely, to give Mando a mission and then wait off-screen for him to come back.
There’s a scene where she interacts with Grogu and you can actually see something light up in Weaver Favreau has mentioned she kept picking up the puppet between takes, couldn’t stop talking to him, and that warmth is real. It’s also completely underdeveloped. I kept waiting for the movie to give her something to do, and it kept not doing it.
Jeremy Allen White voices Rotta the Hutt with a processed growl that sounds, unavoidably, like Jeremy Allen White being electronically strangled. The character himself is more interesting than the performance Rotta turns out to be a reluctant celebrity, not a prisoner, which is a genuine narrative subversion, and the film briefly becomes about something when it reveals who’s actually been pulling whose strings. That moment works. White’s voice work around it is less convincing, always slightly distracting in the way of someone technically augmented into a role that maybe needed a different approach.
But then there’s Scorsese. The director of Goodfellas and Casino, playing a four-armed alien cook, stone-faced and completely committed, lending a minor supporting role the kind of presence that most lead performances in this franchise have been unable to muster. It’s a stunt, obviously. It’s also just good. The man cannot not be interesting.
What drags the film down is something structural that no amount of casting can fix. The Mandalorian and Grogu was originally a fourth season of television that Lucasfilm decided to retrofit into a theatrical release, and every scene carries the memory of what it used to be. Scenes cut away at moments that feel like episode endings.
Dialogue within the same thirty-minute stretch loops back on itself. There’s a sequence midway through Grogu alone in a forest, doing things the film takes a long time explaining that has the pacing of a season arc crammed into twenty minutes. I found myself checking the time in a way I never did during the show.
That’s the difference between the two formats that this film keeps bumping against. Television earns patience slowly, across weeks, because the audience has invested time and relationship. Cinema has to justify every minute in the room in real time. The original Star Wars ran on pure propulsion Lucas borrowed from Flash Gordon and John Ford and Akira Kurosawa and threw it all at a screen until something ignited.
This film borrows from its own back catalogue and produces something smaller. Which is, sometimes, fine. The scenes between Mando and Grogu quiet, wordless almost, built entirely on Grogu’s enormous expressive eyes and whatever Pedro Pascal can transmit through a helmet and a voice still work the way they always have. That found-family warmth hasn’t faded. It’s just now surrounded by a movie that isn’t always sure what to do with it.
Ludwig Göransson’s score is doing heavy lifting throughout, and it earns every paycheck. He finds ways to make action sequences feel more urgent than they are, and one stretch in the second half I won’t describe it, but it involves a confrontation that’s been building since the opening credits benefits enormously from the score arriving at exactly the right pitch. That’s not a small thing. A lot of what works in this film works because of what you hear, not what you see.
I haven’t stopped thinking about what Favreau was actually going for here. The safest possible version of a Star Wars movie: no new mythology, no sequel-baiting grandeur, nothing that could go catastrophically wrong because nothing is really reaching for anything.
After The Rise of Skywalker, I understand the impulse. But safety has its own cost. The film’s willingness not to fail is also a refusal to genuinely try, and you feel that gap in the back half, when you realize the story isn’t building toward anything that changes the universe these characters live in. By the time the credits roll, nothing has shifted. Mando and Grogu are exactly where they started, only slightly dustier.
And yet. I’d probably go again. Not for the plot, not for the stakes, not because it demands a second viewing but because Grogu eating a blue cookie with absolute private satisfaction is the kind of image that cinema was invented to project at scale, and because Martin Scorsese gesturing with four alien hands is something I genuinely did not expect to see before I died, and because there are ten minutes in the middle of this film where it’s just a man and his kid moving through a dangerous galaxy together, and that’s enough.
Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu 2026 Parents Guide
Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu is Rated PG-13 by Motion Picture Rating (MPA) for sci-fi violence and action.
Violence & Intensity: Action is consistent but never cruel. The film opens with a kinetic battle on an ice planet blasters, hand-to-hand combat, explosions and maintains that rhythm throughout. A gladiatorial arena sequence involves creatures and fighters in combat.
Characters are captured, threatened, and shot at. No blood, no gore, no horror elements. Younger children sensitive to chase or combat sequences may find certain moments intense, but the tone stays firmly in adventure territory.
Language: Completely clean. No profanity, no slurs. Dialogue is occasionally terse and functional — this is a bounty hunter, not a poet but there’s nothing here a parent would flinch at.
Sexual Content / Nudity: None whatsoever. The film has zero romantic or sexual content. Nothing to flag.
Drugs, Alcohol & Smoking: Background elements in underworld cantina settings carry the usual Star Wars ambiance alien drinks, hazy atmospheres but nothing is shown explicitly or treated as appealing. No character uses or endorses substances in any meaningful way.
Age Recommendation: Comfortably appropriate for ages 6 and up. Children who watched the Disney+ series will feel at home immediately. The action is energetic without being disturbing, and Grogu’s constant presence curious, funny, occasionally heroic provides warmth that anchors even the more intense sequences. Parents with children under 5 should use their own judgment about the combat scenes, but there’s nothing here designed to frighten.