Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars
Bottom Line: Nothing great. Nothing horrible. Acting is meh. Except for Donald Glover. He rocks. Some scenes were cool. Some were annoying. Some made no sense.
So yeah, they did a Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) movie and it was fine. There’s really not much else to say about it. The movie puts to the big screen almost every throw away line uttered by Han Solo during Episodes IV-VI with some extra thrown in to show how Han met Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) and Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo).
The end.
Ok, not really.
The acting in the movie is pretty shaky all around except for Donald Glover’s Lando. Boy, did he Billy Dee the heck out of Lando! He had ALL that casual cool. I look forward to Donald Glover’s future Colt 45 commercials and they really need to do a Lando movie. The rest of the cast is effective at times and downright bad at times. They can be somewhat forgiven for this because the script can generously be called pretty good for a Star Wars script. There is one exception to the bad acting and that would be L3-37 (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) who was just about perfect as a feisty droid’s rights droid. Though some people who shall remain nameless and are CLEARLY wrong thought L3 was annoying.
And speaking of annoying, here is an incomplete list of all the things that annoyed me about this movie: the entire beginning, the escape from Corellia, the Kessel run, that stupid space monster, whatever the heck that stupid sliding move was that they did to the Millennium Falcon, what they did to L3, the double crosses (ok, I kind of love/hated this), the Jedi that appears with absolutely no explanation, Han speaking Wookie (though in fairness, this was pretty hilarious).
I don’t really see this movie as much worth watching unless you are a Star Wars fan. It’s a good movie for the Star Wars universe, but there’s not much value add as a one off movie for someone to just go see. But yes, if you like the Star Wars universe, this is a pretty fun background story to one of your favorite characters.