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Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu review: A Blaster and an Apprentice

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from The Mandalorian and Grogu, featuring both title characters

A long time ago, in a galaxy not far away, there was a swashbuckling sci-fi/Western TV series whose snappy writing and charismatic actors eventually inspired a bona fide big-screen adventure. But enough about Firefly. Here we have The Mandalorian and Grogu, the latest product in the Disney empire’s content-generation machine. It’s been seven years since the last Star Wars movie (the unduly maligned Rise of Skywalker), during which time the Mouse House has glutted your streaming queue with all manner of Sithian spin-offs. These offshoots varied in quality—Andor was quite good, The Book of Boba Fett was pretty bad, I forget everything that happened in Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka—but they all fulfilled their mission of sating fans’ appetites for intergalactic mayhem and Force-laden profundity. The Mandalorian was the first of these, and also the most successful according to certain commercial metrics, so it’s been plucked from the outer rim of television and holo-projected into the multiplex, where Disney hopes that the universe’s deadliest bounty hunter and his loveable little green friend will restore the franchise to its prior cinematic glory.

It’s a dubious bet. But when I tell you that The Mandalorian and Grogu is my least favorite Star Wars film to date, it’s both an expression of my disappointment and an acknowledgement of my advancing age. This world that once filled me with excitement and joy—the blue-tinted rushes through hyperspace, the exotic lightsaber duels, the premonitions that someone has a bad feeling about this—now seems chilly and mercenary. Did I grow up, or did the movies bog down? Read More

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Avatar: Fire and Ash review: In the Flame of the Father

Jeremy BeckReviews
Zoe Saldaña and Sam Worthington in Avatar: Fire and Ash

Pandora represents the promise of the new. In narrative terms, the Avatar pictures aren’t revolutionary; they refract age-old tales—about conquest and heroism, exploration and degradation, love and loss—through their own giddy popular mythology. But they are nonetheless designed to astonish viewers with their visual bravado and innovative grammar. In Avatar and its sequel, The Way of Water, James Cameron showed us things we’ve never seen before: blue warriors catapulting through the air and landing on orange winged beasts; reef-dwellers diving into the ocean and communing with its exotic flora and fauna; luminescent landscapes glittering with color and danger. The challenge for the third installment, Fire and Ash, is not just to perpetuate Pandora’s extant wonders, but to conceive of even more dazzling forms of cinematic novelty.

Judged against that lofty standard, Fire and Ash falls a bit short. It is, to be clear, a hugely impressive movie: vibrant and gorgeous, with engaging characters and provocative ideas. But it is also something of a recycling, repurposing its predecessors’ brilliant technique without equaling their sense of true discovery. It’s expectedly amazing. Read More

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The Running Man review: Sprint the Legend

Jeremy BeckReviews
Glen Powell in The Running Man

Glen Powell is a charmer. Yes he’s obscenely good-looking, but he also possesses a natural magnetism—a glint in his eye, a spark in his smile—that draws you toward him. Hit Man, Twisters, and Anyone But You may be of varying quality, but Powell is roguishly appealing in all of them, elevating the material with his calibrated carelessness. The Running Man, the new science-fiction movie from Edgar Wright, attempts to nudge the actor’s inherent allure into a different register, envisioning him not as an amiable romantic lead but as a bruising, brooding action hero.

“I’m not angry,” are the first words we hear from Ben Richards (Powell), in a tone that indicates the opposite. Myself, I am hardly incensed by The Running Man, but I nonetheless find it misguided and dispiriting. Not only does it fail to leverage the skills of its leading man, but it also struggles to work as a piece of blockbuster filmmaking. For a movie ostensibly focused on speed and excitement, it is oddly sluggish and sullen. Read More

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Predator: Badlands review: All Riot on the Western Hunt

Jeremy BeckReviews
Elle Fanning and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi in Predator: Badlands

In Alien, Ian Holm described the titular xenomorph as a creature “unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” The Predator, the snarling extraterrestrial villain of Fox’s other flagship sci-fi/horror franchise, is marginally more humanoid, but it’s similarly ruthless; in the 38 years since Arnold Schwarzenegger christened it “one ugly motherfucker,” it’s never betrayed any sense of compassion. Still, beneath its primal bloodlust there has always lurked a hint of, if not humanity, then at least sincerity. Whereas the Alien is driven by evolutionary imperatives, the Predator carries itself with a certain swagger, busting heads and ripping out spinal cords with taunting superiority. It doesn’t kill because it has to; it kills because that’s what makes it happy.

So it isn’t entirely a subversion that Predator: Badlands envisions its central beast not as a savage lone wolf but as a scorned member of a functioning society. Its main character, Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), may have the flattened snout and black dreadlocks from Predator flicks of yore, but he is initially defined by his relative weakness. Dek isn’t a murdering machine; he’s just a little brother, one who’s desperate to impress both his elder sibling and his disapproving father, the latter of whom dismisses him as a runt. Inferiority complex, daddy issues, obsessed with cool toys—Predators, they’re just like us! Read More

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Tron: Ares review: Jet with the Program

Jeremy BeckReviews
Greta Lee, Jared Leto, and Arturo Castro in Tron: Ares

There has never been a good Tron movie. But Ares, the third installment in this baffling techno-obsessed franchise, is probably the least bad of the bunch. It retains the series’ sleek, color-coded aesthetic while also taking steps to minimize its mythological inanity. Calling it smart would be a stretch, but it reflects enough considered thought to qualify as sensible debugging.

Not that the storytelling in Ares is especially persuasive, or even interesting. In an accidental flirtation with topicality, its screenplay (by Jesse Wigutow) contemplates the rewards and costs of artificial intelligence. Corporate warfare has broken out over the search for “the permanence code,” an electronic MacGuffin that will allow digitized creations to attain lasting physical form. On one side of this commercial conflict is Eve (Greta Lee), an environmentally conscious entrepreneur who longs to continue the work of her deceased sister, envisioning the code as a vehicle for medical and scientific breakthroughs. On the other is Dillinger (Evan Peters), an industrial scion who dreams of commodifying and militarizing the technology; when we first meet him, he’s demoing its capabilities to a brigade of generals who salivate at the notion of a powerful and indefatigable soldier who executes all commands without question. Eve, in contrast, wants to make an orange grove whose trees always bear fruit. You earn no points for guessing which character is the movie’s chief villain. Read More

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