I don’t review movies in the Star Wars universe the usual way. Solo: A Star Wars Story is no exception (nor do I watch these movies in the usual way — 9:15 a.m. screening time right here, readers!). Here are things I noted in this latest entry:
(a) Once again, these plots require sextants. This one: Corellian orphan Han and Chewbacca hooks up with Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson, chewing on lines as if they were beef jerky), a member of the Crimson Dawn crime syndicate and the first person in the Star Wars universe with a name you’d recognize in Milwaukee even if his home world is Glee Anselm. For the sake of Dryden Vos (it’s possible the Kasdan family had totems of Anglo-Irish literature on the brain, now that I think about it), played by Paul Bettany, they must steal an unstable element called coaxium from Kessel, a spice colony worked by slaves and a joke well worked by the Kasdan crew, who constructed a movie around a throwaway line from A New Hope.
(b) Alden Ehrenreich, whom I saw eight years ago in Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro and impressed the hell out of me, has an accent like Scrunchy Face and a gosh-darn delivery that’s roguish without being dangerous, which, I guess, is the point of Han Solo.
(c) Ron Howard’s talent is for turning meat into potatoes. He and editor Pietro Scalia show an amateur’s talent for fight sequences, not to mention treating the Kasdan family script as if it were the Constitution.
(d) This is the Galaxy, and Donald Glover/Childish Gambino can have unresolved lusts, such as for droid L3-37, who for most of her/his/its sequences longs for the gambler and pilot. And his Billy Dee Williams impersonation is uncanny hence boring.
(e) In the absence of a compelling villain, nothing is at stake at Solo except for figuring out when and how the Millennium Falcon will pass into his hands. A certain villain appears in the last ten minutes, though; the audience stirred. Instead, Paul Bettany as Betsy DeVos or whatever swings a laser scythe.
(f) The ebullient L3-37 leads a slave revolt in the Kessel spice mines. Lando on the Falcon urges her to cease and desist, a command she ignores. The politics are shall we say muddled.
Box office reports have disappointed industry wags, leading them to blame saturation. Or maybe word got out that the thing was just blah? Rote and professional, Solo: A Star Wars Story works hard to quash original ideas while at least the last film in the “regular” series attempted something, however awkwardly. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. The next Star Wars entry isn’t a galaxy far, far away. Otherwise, treat Solo as if it were a mid eighties Paul McCartney album.
GRADE: C+
Humanizing The Vacuum 