It's dumb. It's basically the same crap as the TV show, but noisier, as the score desperately tries to evoke all the feelings that the acting and dialogue and camera work cannot.

The titular Mandalorian is employed by New Republic Colonel Sigourney Weaver (she has a name, I think, but it's not important and never mentioned) to hunt down former Imperial leaders and return them to the New Republic for interrogation & trials. To get a tip on one of his targets from the Hutts, he has to retrieve Radda the Hutt, son of Jabba, from gladiatorial slavery. The problem is, Radda is fine where he is and not all that thrilled with the idea of returning to his criminal family. So our heroes must approach the crime boss who employs him as a fighter, and so on and so one.

It's a tedious, low-stakes story, where contrivances dominate the plot, everyone is grossly incompetent unless it's convenient for the plot, Grogu's power level and level of maturity and intelligence is exactly what is convenient for the plot, and almost all the combat is hand to hand, and most of it involves CGI monsters and aliens and droids and a protagonist whose face is covered for all but one scene, so there are no human stakes to any of it. There is also remarkably little blood and gore, and even when using swords and axes in fights, the combatants seem to employ them as bludgeoning devices. The Mandalorian gets captured a couple of times and each time is left in his full armor for no diegetic reason. The writers also take strenuous efforts to avoid giving him anything like a moral dilemma or actually display his informed ruthless dedication to his mission and Mandalorian creed. Things just so happen to work out so he never has to cross any lines to satisfy either issue.

It's too dumb for even for kids and too advanced for small children as well. The only good news seems to be that Mandalore & Bo Katan & Dark Sabers are all busy elsewhere.

If I was in a movie theater and had a choice of watching this again, or watching any other Star Wars movie, all of which I have seen more than once, I would watch just about anything else. Except for The Last Jedi & The Force Awakens. Rise of Skywalker is also worse than this one, but it's entertainingly, hilariously bad. This is just a bad movie, that has the advantage over Episodes VII & VIII in that absolutely no one you care about from the original six films is being tarnished by appearing in it.

SPOILERS!
It's a string of dumb, dumb garbage. When Rodda does not want out, Din Djarin goes to the crime lord, Jadu, to get his debt cleared, so he can return Rodda to the other Hutts. It involves intimidating a food vendor to find the crime lord, then having a bar brawl in his HQ, before the crime lord intervenes. Why are people having a bar brawl with a man in full armor, trying punch & kick & hit him with handy objects? Why do they lock the doors and standing menacingly to beat him up, instead of trying to shoot him? Because it's a kid's movie, I guess.

So the crime lord intervenes and invites Din into his back office, where he tries to do some worldbuilding by explaining how in this place, salt is super valuable, so they use fist-sized lumps as currency. Din scoffs that salt is not all that valuable where he comes from. Then he tries to hand over a pouch of coins to clear Rodda's debt, saying "That buys a lot of salt where I come from." You just said, salt is not worth much. Buying a lot of salt is not a high bar to clear where you come from!

Anyway, Jadu reveals that Rodda's upcoming final fight is his final fight in every sense, that he has brought in an endless string of huge monsters to keep throwing at Rodda until he's dead. Then he gives Din a big chunk of salt as a gift/bribe to make him go away. Din then drops it in the drink of the henchman who initially refused him entry. None of this makes sense. Why give up something very valuable to you, when the man you offer it to has already made it clear he does not value it? I suppose Din dropping the salt in the drink is a sign of contempt, like lighting a cigar with a hundred dollar bill, but also, that's not how salt works. When a chunk of salt dissolves in a liquid, you can just evaporate the liquid to get the salt back! He didn't actually destroy anything, just made a thug richer.

Anyway, Din breaks back into the gladiator cell block to convince Radda that he is being set up, but Radda just calls the guards, and the room fills with gas, which Mandalorian armor does nothing to keep out, and Din & Grogu fall unconscious. He wakes up, still in armor, in a gladiator cell, with the door open into the arena, where he is facing off against Rodda. They fight, Din gets the upper hand, but when he makes it clear that he is not going to kill Rodda, the Hutt just ignores the blade at his ... throat? face?... and bodyslams Din. So Din beats him again, and then yields. He announces this, claiming that since Rodda has won, he is free to go. Jadu just LoLs and announces Rodda is free ... to die! Which raises the question, if he had no intention of following the rules and allowing Radda to go free, and zero qualms about admitting it, why not just make extra profit by selling Radda back to the Hutts, after giving the paying customers the climactic fight they were asking for? He said that only a select few even knew that Radda was doomed, so it's not like the crowd would have been disappointed if he let Radda win a bunch of matches, and then reneged on his freedom & shipped him back to Nal Hutta.

Anyway a bunch of giant monsters come out to posture for the fight. Most of them appear to be based on the holographic chess game that Chewbacca & R2-D2 were playing the OG movie. The film appears to be saying that they are not sapient, but are animals, even if one of them wields a hammer as a weapon. And yet, each one comes out of its own gate and pauses for the camera, waiting for the cue to attack. A laser/electric barrier surrounds the top of the arena walls to keep the creatures from climbing out to attack the spectators, and Din Djarin & Rodda team up to defend themselves against the creatures. Despite fighting with bladed weapons, they mostly just bludgeon and throw their attackers. One them, with electricity arcing in its mouth is thrown into the barrier, which shorts it out and the creatures all immediately stop fighting and charge the crowd and fight their way out of the facility. So this random assortment of monsters are all intelligent, sufficiently familiar with technology to understand that the lights going out means they can escape, and all immediately ignore the other threats in the arena to charge to freedom. But the freedom they all seek seems to be mass slaughter. They all just want to smash & kill. BTW, most of them are quadrupeds and look & behave like animals. There is just no consistency, they are acting in whatever way causes the most harm.

Radda also escapes, so Din & Grogu follow. There is the shot in the trailer of Grogu jumping into an abandoned hovering baby carriage and zipping away. The context is that a Rodian, on seeing the creatures come breaking out of the arena building, snatches its Rodian baby from the hover-carriage. Rodda steals a speeder and takes off, and that's why Grogu commandeers the hover-carriage, to pursue him. Which raises the question, if that thing can do high speed car chases, why did its owner yank the baby out of it and run? Why not turn it on and use it to pull both parent & child rapidly out of the way? I don't care how small it is, if it can keep up with a car, it can at least yank an adult a few hundred feet to safety. Meanwhile, Din is just standing there while Grogu hops into the hover-carriage, adjusts it to pursuit configuration and zooms after Radda, before finally taking to the air in his jetpack to follow. When they catch Radda, and prepare to return him, he reveals that his aunt & uncle are stringing along Din Djarin, and that the location of the Imperial Leader, a guy named Coyne, which they promised to give him in exchange for Radda, is actually right where they are. Jadu the crime lord is actually Jadu Coyne.

So Din, Grogu, Radda and Zeb (Zeb, from the "Rebels" cartoon, is in this) reconnoiter Jadu's desert (of course) base and see it swarming with stormtroopers. Which calls into question everything we have been shown about how he operates as a crime boss. I don't have the time or mental energy to break down all the contradictions or plot holes in that. Suffice to say, Din & Zeb assault the base, arrest Jadu and fight their way out, mostly engaging stormtroopers in hand to hand combat. Just like everyone did in the original trilogy, right?

Din calls for Radda & Grogu, both still on his ship, and sleeping, to warm up the ship, because he is being pursued and needs to take off fast. Radda has no idea how to operate a ship, and we are treated to yet another sequence of Grogu suddenly reverting to toddler intelligence to comically fail to carry out any of Din's instructions. Instead of following the directions to start the engines, he randomly fires missile that narrowly miss Din & company. ISN'T THIS HILARIOUS?!?!

Anyway, they get aboard safely, the pursuit on their heels doesn't have any effect, because stormtroopers are less crack soldiers, and more keystone cops since Disney took over the IP and they return Jadu to the rebel base. Colonel Sigourney is annoyed that Din walked in with a high value Imperial target, instead of the gladiator slave whose only interest to the New Republic was as a bargaining chip, specifically to obtain this very captive. Din walks her through the logic, possibly because, judging by her acting, Weaver was yanked out of bed, dressed in a rebel uniform and thrust into a green-screened studio in front of a camera & teleprompter before she had any coffee. Colonel Sigourney relents, but complains the New Republic intelligence has been cultivating a relationship with the Hutts and failing to deliver Radda is going to piss them off. Also, they might come after Din Djarin.

Anyway, Din arranges passage for Radda on a "gun runner." We see no interactions with any crew, just a ship land, with a glimpse of a droid pilot, Radda boards, and it flies off. My first question was "A. Why is a gunrunner landing so close to a military base for the galactic government? B. How does Din know he can trust this gunrunner not to turn Radda in to the Hutts for a reward?" Because "gunrunner" denotes someone involved with commerce in illegal armaments. As a government that is stretched thin trying to keep the peace in the region, as was clearly established in Season 3 of the show, a gunrunner is something they would want to crack down on hard, because his customers are going to be problems for them. And Din is acting like he is committed to the New Republic, even refusing a fee for bringing in Coyne, so he should not be all that sanguine about letting one operate. Unless he is cynically hoping that more heavily-armed criminals in the region will lead to more work for himself.

Next a small ship with a quartet of Babu Fricks arrive to help Din modify his new bounty hunting vessel, which was the deposit on his fee for hunting down Rotta and/or Coyne. Another bounty hunter, who has a Captain America type shield that he wears like a hat, with a pet space wolf, arrives at the Din homestead, and lures him out into a trap. Din's home security is really shitty for an elite military type who spends lots of time on the wrong side of the law, but he gets zapped with some stunning thingy that renders his armor useless, and the wolf snatches one of the Babu Fricks to play with. Not kill & eat. Din distracts it from playing with the Frickian by tossing a blue cookie, so the Frickian can jump into the safety of Din's cell. Because one of their own has been taken, the Frickians fly in pursuit, allowing Grogu to ride with them.

On Nal Hutta, Din is presented to the Hutt siblings, who reveal that they have Radda captive and he is being tortured. They take off his helmet to spite him, threaten to torture him to death, taking a long time to do it, and then do the same to Grogu after he is dead and cannot protect the baby, all while also reveling in his shame for losing the helmet. Din points out that there is a new loophole in the helmet rule, that you can avoid excommunication by making sure everyone who saw your face dies. The Hutts ahaha at this and in classic Hutt fashion, open the floor to drop him into a giant underwater cavern/dungeon with the big white snake monster from the trailer. They throw in his helmet to mock him, and laugh as he fights the snake. But Grogu & the Frickians have already reunited with the captive Frickian and infiltrated the Hutts' palace. They are in the drain pipes leading into the pit, Grogu shines a light to signal his presence to Din and plants a bomb to blow a hole in the dungeon, allowing the water to drain & Din to escape, but not before the snake bites Din, mortally poisoning him. Grogu & the Frickians lead him back to the ship, where he points out that he is too big to fit on their ship. The Frickians garble something about coming back, and Din charges into the jungle to kill as many Hutt troopers as possible before he dies. He collapses and bugs start to crawl all over his armor, and scorpion is about to plunge its stinger under his helment, when Grogu arrives and eats it. The other bugs vanish, presumably with all the enemy guards who just vanished once Din could no longer evade them under his own power, because the plot needed him not to get caught.

Grogu closes the wound in his side, and builds a mud igloo to shelter him. He uses the force to slide Din's comatose body into the entry, and there is a moment of HILARITY, as he repeatedly bonks Din's head against the back wall of the too-short shelter in a futile effort to get the man's feet inside too. He settles for camouflaging the books with branches and goes hunting. He finds a lizard person sewing in front of a hut (one "t", not the slug people) with a rack of fish hanging behind. He steals a fish and brings it back to the mud igloo to eat. Later he returns looking for another fish, and sees the lizard person talking to the bounty hunter who captured Din. The bounty hunter goes away, and the lizard person reveals he knew about the fish theft. The bounty hunter has advised the local that Din was poisoned, and he prepares an antidote to give Grogu for him. Why he covers for Grogu & allows the theft to pass is unclear. It is implied that he is anti Hutt and the bounty hunter's story of their resistance and escape has moved him, and maybe he has read the script and knows that betraying the crime lords who rule the planet is safe, because Din is about to kick their asses.

Anyway, Din recovers and he & Grogu stumble across the gunrunner ship that carried off Radda crashed in the jungle. The Hutts who were eager to sell Din's armor on the black market, until they weren't, and fed him to a Whitesnake, had zero interest in salvaging the crashed ship so near to their home. Nor were any of the locals interested in the value of the vessel, or its cargo which appears to be an arsenal-quantity number of working rifles and blasters. Din flicks some switches in the cockpit and the ship, which was so overgrown that it is hard to distinguish from the surrounding jungle, quickly lights up. He and Grogu agree that rather than spend the rest of their lives running from the Hutts, they should take the fight to them. So they lift off and crash the ship into the Hutts' palace, bulldozing through the fire of their anti-air defenses and crashing safely deep inside the palace, where they fight their way into the throne room. Din is attacked by the bounty hunter and Grogu Force-tranquilizes the space wolf and then frees Radda, who fights his aunt & uncle, causing the floor to collapse and all the bad guys fall into the Whitesnake pit, but the bounty hunter & wolf escape and Grogu levitates Radda to safety, as the Hutt twins get eaten. The Frickians return with Colonel Sigourney and a squad of X-wings & Y-Wings. Included in the pilots are Dave Filoni, Captain Teva with the white hair one expects to see on a person with the sort of reflexes typically demanded of a fighter pilot, and Zeb in a U-wing, which he uses to extract Din, Radda & Grogu, while the fights blow up the Palace. Two missiles from the Y-wings utterly destroy it, confirming how utterly stupid are the bombers deployed against the Supremacy in tLJ, and what a shitshow the Resistance military devolves into under General Organa.

All is happy, Radda joins the New Republic and Din give Grogu flying lessons.

One of things they want us to believe is that Din Djarin is extremely competent and some sort of expert combatant. But then they have moronic crap like he makes absolutely no plans for a hot extraction, counting on Radda & Grogu to get the ship ready to take off quick. But he has not trained Grogu on the startup sequence or anything nor verified that Radda can even fit in the cockpit. Cars can be started up by remote, IRL. In this setting, they have artificial intelligence devices that are so ubiquitous they are used for jobs that sapient beings can't be risked to do, up to and including cannon fodder. When you are literally the only person in your group capable of operating the ship to any degree, you should be prepared for any sort of emergency where this might be necessary.

If I was going to be doing dangerous stuff, where I might have to worry about being chased, I would want my transportation ready to move the very instant I was in it, if I couldn't get someone to drive me. If I had a familial relationship with a person accompanying me on a dangerous mission, I would be trying to pre-plan for every contingency that involved them. If someone who was depending on my good will to not be handed over to the mob for execution was aboard, I would make it absolutely clear how much his life depended to being alert and aware and protecting this family member of mine. I cannot imagine that at any point emergency start up and escape plans would not cross my mind and cause me to figure out what to do for such a situation. FFS, Radda is a highly adept combatant, with enormous physical strength. I'd take HIM on the mission, and leave Zeb at the helm. Not least because Zeb is nominally more trustworthy, and committed to the mission, whereas Radda might be lying to save his life and looking for the first chance to bolt, so I can keep an eye on him, and he knows the layout of the base marginally better than anyone else in the group. You could even make a thing about Radda's sleeping in the ship is because as a gladiator, he never needed to worry about standing watch or being alert, because he was protected and provided for, and his enemies were announced with fanfare, so there are gaps in his warrior skillset. But the people doing these Star Wars shows clearly have no idea about any of this stuff. They don't know, or think, about tactics, military procedures, espionage, covert ops or intrigue. All they have is a categoric knowledge of Star Wars minutiae, possibly.

Speaking of which, the best Star Wars movie is being tainted by every appearance of the AT-AT Imperial walkers that were such an implacable menace to the rebels. In Rogue One, we had the issue where they were being killed with a single shot by a X-wing fighter, that was maneuvering and fighting in atmosphere for the first time, chronologically in the whole series. They had done it in the prior movie, Episode VII, but that took place far in the future, and my still-good-faith cope was that with the two sides still using X-wings and TIE fighters, they had been upgraded in their capabilities, the franchise was absolutely NOT standing still. So X-wings could now maneuver and fight in atmosphere, and TIE fighters too. Otherwise, one might have to wonder why neither side used them to defend or attack Echo Base on Hoth. Why couldn't a bunch of TIE bombers streak in and pound the rebels' deflector shield until it collapsed? Why couldn't fighters fly air cover for the AT-AT force? And on the rebels' side, why didn't they use X-wings against the AT-ATs? The best answer was that they could not. They were built for merely a burst of speed to rapidly get through the atmosphere and into space, where they had different propulsion systems to maneuver and dodge and evade enemy ships. Given that TIEs don't even appear to have landing gear and the side panels seem highly suspect for the purpose, I would have said that they aren't intended for it in any fashion at all. But then Rogue One had the exact same fighter unit that Luke and Wedge flew with at Yavin, attacking the surface of Scarif and blasting AT-ATs! Luke and Wedge were on Hoth. They had X-wings. But they only used the X-wings to escape the planet, and lost a bunch of their pilots in speeders, with weapons that could not even singe the walkers. If atmospheric flight was possible, Red Squadron could have wasted the whole Imperial ground force in a single sortie!

ANYWAY, back to the point of my rant, Din Djarin is now also easily taking out AT-AT. These things had good enough gunnery to take shoot down aircraft, but they can't hit Din on a AT-RT walker, and he can kill one with a bomb on its leg.

Finally, there is the point that this contract for the New Republic, to hunt down a deck of cards of Imperial leaders, is said to be important for the safety of the Republic, and to prevent another war. And Din has seemingly bought in on the idea of the New Republic, to the point that you get the impression his position is, while being paid is nice and he really wants to be paid, he would do without if he had to, because the mission is just that important.

Except, the sequel movies exist, so we know it's all futile, and The Mandalorian show makes an ongoing case that there is not as much difference as you'd think between the Empire & New Republic. The original client in the first episode of the whole show gave a little speech, that was both creepy and made you believe the speaker really did see it this way, about how the Empire improves every place it rules by any tangible metric. Well, I don't buy that kind of assessment of a government IRL, so I'm not going to swallow it in Star Wars either. Freedom and morality are important. But Season 3 featured Dr. Pershing, an apolitical scientist with no ideology, just a desire to improve medical treatment in the galaxy, that led to his being reluctantly coopted by Moff Gideon for unethical experiments, who was now enduring a dehumanizing rehabilitation program, where an Imperial infiltrator entrapped him into violating his parole, causing him to be subjected to literal brainwashing, with an actual brain-altering machine which his betrayer then cranked up past safe parameters. Because she, a probationary rehab subject herself, was left alone with a patient undergoing this procedure! And apparently her role in whatever happened to Pershing was never discovered, because she is next seen working in a clerical role under a high-ranking supply officer, and has access to discussions about allocating manpower. After THAT, we see that she is still secretly reporting to Moff Gideon! Republic security is a joke, they are being horrifically unethical in their treatment of former Imperial personnel, and also seemingly arbitrary in that treatment. Scientists having demeaning make work and are constantly subjected to the scrutiny of droids, while former military officers are given positions of high trust, and whatever security vetting is applied, is a complete failure.

In the episode where we saw that unreconstructed Imperial officer working in the supply HQ, we learned that the New Republic is so deficient in manpower that they can't do anything to stop piracy on the Fringes, to the point that a X-wing pilot actually goes out of the chain of command to drop the word to a mercenary band of the pirate problem and the opportunities for employment. Meanwhile, a captive Imperial Moff's transport is attacked, he is rescued and the ship left adrift in space, and no one in the New Republic is aware of it, only recalling that he just never showed up for his trial, when the drift is found adrift in the void and open to vacuum. Also, they are scrapping Imperial Star Destroyers on a large scale, but these Star Destroyers are also seeming left so unprotected that you can jump off a passing train, wander into the shipyard and loot Imperial equipment from them to your hearts' content.

Still another episode showed us a surviving Separatist from the Clone Wars, who has not been reconciled to the defeat of the cause, the rise of the Empire, or its replacement by the New Republic. He is introducing malware into the droid labor force of a decadent planet, ruled by a former Imperial and graduate of the rehab program, who married into the aristocracy of the planet, and as somehow arranged for a massive number of reprogrammed CIS battle droids to be the Morlocks to the flesh & blood population's Eloi.

Just going by what we have seen in productions starring Pedro Pascal's voice as The Mandalorian, the New Republic has serious problems, and we know how it's all going to end up anyway, with the Empire, rebranded as the First Order, coming back and destroying the government of the Republic, while an incompetent Resistance flails and fails to contain them. So why is he so invested in the New Republic? Why do they expect US to be?

Star Wars is dead.