I actually watched and enjoyed all three seasons of The Mandalorian on Disney+ so I am probably the target audience for this movie. I am not going to elaborate too deeply on what is a quintessential popcorn action flick, other than to point out that at its core this movie feels to me like what Star Wars is actually about - fun world building, light but exciting action, some fun characters, lots of exotic set pieces and a story that just keeps on chugging along. It is not about deep inner meaning, philosophical elaboration or complex, nuanced plots, and yeah that means I think something like Andor may be good science ficiton but maybe not good Star Wars.
Anyway, This movie showcases what feels a bit like a truncated mini season of the Mandalorian, focusing on a relatively tight and low-stakes skirmish between the Mandalorian and his pokemon Grogu vs. a series of renegade imperial warlords and a Hutt clan. Along the way we get a secondary cast of characters that includes the super buff son of Jabba the Hutt and a funky alien guy I am told is from the cartoons that acts both as Mando's getaway driver and Alfred Pennyworth. The movie is well paced and very fast, and the incredibly lush visual world building of Hutt space is a pleasure to watch.
The bulk of the action in this movie is essentially "John Wick, but in Space" and even feels filmed in similar manner to those films. It works well for me, but it isn't maybe as zingy and frenetic as some other directors have done for the Star Wars films. It's also a very low-key story told primarily through a guy who's emotionally deadpan, hidden behind a mask and surrounded by puppet monsters for most of the movie, so the fact that this has any emotional resonance at all is a bit of a miracle.
I felt this movie fit a few specialized genres really well. First and most prominent is what I call the "Compenent Male" subgenre, of a suitably male figure who is confronted with a cycle of violence and he unerringly --and very comptently-- manages to wade his way through. This is the genre occupied by John Wick and other movies, many of which contain Bruce Willis, Jason Statham or Keannu Reeves in which the point of the movie is to watch our hero brute force his way through an endless wave of opposition with incredible style and panache. The Mandalorian does this repeatedly, murdering hundreds of stormtroopers, killer droids and lizard men with mesmerising efficiency.
The second subgenre this movie hits marks on is the dominion of Competency Porn, which has been characterized as the genre of films about people who do their jobs really, really well and who demonstrate great knowledge and profiency at their tasks. Mandalorian's proficiency is combat and getting out of tight places....and he does this repeatedly very well, and when luck finally runs out for him it kicks in for his tiny buddy Grogu.
Finally this film is a member of the "Dad Movie" genre, which is the less dour companion to the "Sad Dad" genre which usually is reflected in certain video games. In this movie Mandalorian is the dad, and Grogu is the wayward adopted son he has decided to teach a lifestyle of murder and bounty hunting to. It's a fun romp watching this happen, and while my son was in a theater full of Gen alphas and Gen Zs waching The Backrooms I was in a theater with men in their fifties and sixties watch The Mandalorian raise Grogu in the arts of murder and subterfuge.
The movie is also, thanks to having a cast that is almost 90% faceless protagonst surrounded by mechanical puppets, animatronics and stop-motion robots and monsters (and no doubt plenty of CGI in the mix) a spiritual successor to the likes of The Muppets, Dark Crystal, Fraggle Rock and other wayward films of the eighties and nineties that had Jim Henson connected to them. The sheer number of actual real monster props that were animated and not just CGI in this movie is amazing. The sequences involving Babu Freek's gang of tiny engineers (are they all Babu Freek? I don't know) and Grogu, who meets other eerie puppets in the swamp immediately had me thinking "Best Fraggle Rock sequel, ever," but honestly, it was fun....a lot of fun.
So yeah, I liked this movie, it felt like a roller coaster and had no pretense of being anything more than that (unlike say The Last Jedi, for example). For me this may be my fourth favorite Star Wars film, behind the original (A New Hope), TESB and ROTS in that order. Solid A!
Oh! I do have a gripe: the number of times that Mando loses his signature pistol then mysteriously recovers it later on despite the fact that there was no way he could have found it so easily was bordering on a running gag. I can only assume he had a 3-D Printer Holster that quickly regenerates the gun each time he loses it.
Bonus Spoiler Alert!
I very much enjoyed the James Bondian end sequence when the New Republic fighter squadron comes to the rescue, as they laconically....as if bored out of their minds....managed to systematically annihilate the entire air/space defense grid of the Hutts in one fell swoop and with no losses of their own.
