The Mandalorian and Grogu review
By Joel Humphries · Watched 05.24.26
★★★½ 3.5 / 5
Spoiler-free review
The Mandalorian and Grogu looks terrific in IMAX and delivers the polished action, creatures and cameos expected from modern Star Wars, but it still feels like several television episodes sewn into a two-and-a-half-hour feature. Time spent reintroducing the characters leaves them almost exactly where they began, while Grogu’s permanent intelligent-baby routine increasingly limits how much he can grow without sacrificing the gimmick audiences love. Mando fights nearly everyone and Filoni devotees will get more from familiar animated faces than I did. This is an enjoyable, rewatchable big-screen adventure that never quite explains why it had to be a movie.
Full review — contains spoilers
Mandalorian and Grogu basically feels like three or four episodes of The Mandalorian stitched together and blown up onto an IMAX screen. Luckily, The Mandalorian is a pretty good show, so it still works for the most part.
The movie looks great. The CGI is solid, the action scenes are fun, and the production values are exactly what you’d expect from modern Star Wars. I had a pretty good time with it overall. But the story itself feels oddly held back. You can tell they had to spend a lot of time reintroducing these characters for casual audiences, so the movie barely moves them forward at all.
Mando and Grogu basically start the movie as the same characters we already know and end it in pretty much the exact same place. Nothing really changes. Nobody learns much of anything. It’s two and a half hours long and sometimes still feels a bit smaller storywise than some of the better episodes of the show.
That said, there’s a ton of action. Mando fights basically everyone. Cad Bane shows up for the Filoni fans, which I’m sure people who loved the animated shows went nuts for. I was never super into the cartoons myself, so that stuff didn’t really hit me emotionally, but it all fits together well enough.
The thing that stood out most to me is that Grogu feels kind of stuck as a character now. It’s starting to feel like the Bumblebee problem from Transformers. Bumblebee couldn’t talk in the first live action Transformers moviebecause of the proportion voice malfunction that they worked into the script for humor and then they were locked into that gimmick forever because audiences connected the character with it. Grogu feels similar. He’s basically this intelligent fifty-year-old baby who can only communicate through little noises and head tilts. It’s cute, but eventually that starts to limit the character. If they ever give him a real voice, part of the charm disappears. But if they don’t, how much more can they really do with him?
I enjoyed this a lot. I’d definitely watch it again. But it never really justified being a movie instead of just another half season of TV. And since I think the show at its best is honestly a four or even four-and-a-half star series, this slightly watered-down big-screen version lands more around 3.5.