Nearly the whole voice cast comes back and Gavin Hammon is under the helmet, but Chris Buckley’s fifty-minute special rebuilds the series brick for brick without adding a joke worth the plastic. For small fans and completists only.
The LEGO Star Wars specials have a licence most spin-offs would kill for. The bricks give them permission to break things: to pull a scene apart, to let a villain complain about his own plot, to treat a sacred text as a toy box. LEGO Star Wars: The Mandalorian has that licence and chooses not to use it. Chris Buckley directs fifty minutes that retell the television series in miniature, hitting its beats in order, and the only thing it adds is the sound of plastic clicking.
The voice cast is the reason anyone over the age of ten might sit down for it. Amy Sedaris is back as Peli Motto, Bill Burr as Migs Mayfield, Giancarlo Esposito as Moff Gideon, Nick Nolte as Kuiil, Katee Sackhoff as Bo-Katan Kryze, Emily Swallow as the Armorer, Ming-Na Wen as Fennec Shand, Rosario Dawson as Ahsoka Tano and Taika Waititi as the droids IG-11 and IG-12. That is close to the full company of the show, and it is a real pleasure to hear them in the same room, or at least the same recording booth. Gavin Hammon takes the title role, and since the whole point of the Mandalorian is that we never see his face, a man made of bricks with a new voice is about as faithful as a substitution can be.
The trouble is what the cast have been given to say. The jokes are mild where they should be rude, and they arrive in the gaps between plot points rather than growing out of them. The best LEGO comedy works because the characters half know they are toys and resent it; here everyone behaves as if the live-action script had simply been photocopied onto smaller paper. Esposito gets to be menacing in a voice built for menace, and Sedaris gets to be exasperated, which she does as well as anyone alive. Neither is asked to do anything the series did not already ask.
We were bored, and then we were irritated about being bored, because the cause was so plain. Everybody on the screen already knows this story, and so does everybody watching it, and the special has decided that is enough. A retelling in bricks only earns its place if the bricks let it do something the original could not, and for fifty minutes we waited for that something and it did not come. When a special about a bounty hunter who never removes his helmet cannot find a single new angle on the helmet, the imagination has gone somewhere else.
Measured against its own cousins, it comes up short. The earlier LEGO Star Wars projects have had a sense of play about them, a willingness to let the saga look silly for a moment and then love it anyway. This one is neat and respectful and oddly cautious, as if someone had decided the Mandalorian was too valuable to be laughed at. The one critic to have weighed in so far has called it a disappointing retread, and we see no reason to argue; the consensus, such as it is, is right.
Children who know the series will enjoy spotting the sets and will not mind that the story is a rerun. Parents who know the series will be able to predict every scene from the sofa, which at fifty minutes is bearable and at any greater length would not have been. The bricks are the only thing here that look like they might make a shape nobody has seen before, and the special never picks them up.
