It's been nearly seven years since there was a new Star Wars movie released in theatres, and there are lots of ways to do it. Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, a disjointed off-ramp that lacks the scale and ambition of its sisters, fails the task. As the Mandalorians might say, this is not the way.

Creator and director Jon Favreau has seen his Disney+ series about a minor Star Wars character turned into a huge summer cinematic tentpole, and it buckles under the pressure, turning the Mandalorian into a trigger-happy John Wick and failing to do anything meaningful with one of Hollywood's cutest critters, affectionately called Baby Yoda.

Sigourney Weaver, as a New Republic colonel, early on admonishes the Mandalorian after a bloody mission: "Messy. Very messy". The same could be said for this overlong and overviolent chapter, which relies on too many computer effects and exposes the limits of puppetry. In IMAX, it's positively clumsy.