rw-15604

For all the pleasure of seeing the old cast in the same movie again, it's unfortunately also already a very old movie. The same jokes, same situations, same 'ol tropes, same... same. Where it was fresh, witty and original forty years ago it now just feels old and tired. The actors - freshly extracted from their respective retirements homes - speak slowly, move slowly, act slowly. Eddie Murphy still moves, talks and quips with the same spark as before, but this is a not a one-person stand-up comedy show and both the script and his fellow actors drag him down. The various re-enactments - and the movie seems mainly made up of those - of skits and highlights from the original just feels predictable, slow and uninteresting. We all know how they're going to end, one and all.

In the end... yes... a very sympathetic cast reunion and that saves it from a less flattering score, but that's simply not enough to make it a good movie. Let the actors return to their retirement homes, honours intact, but... stay there, this time.

How can something so far from the Star Wars canon make it all the way into production? It's staggering to see the sheer quantity of resources which has been wasted on this mess. The fiasco ranges all the way from the Jedi order which somehow has been reduced to a dogma-driven institution where the concept of the force is nowhere to be seen, to the strangely inflected spoken lines by Lee Jung-jae who seems to have to make a break every three-four words, sometimes in the middle of a word, to remind himself how the sentence ends... Unfortunately probably all too true as he does not speak English, so how he managed to land this role is a mystery. Then all the pointless badly choreographed fights we all know how they must end even before they start... no, weapons don't work on arch villains, designated heroes are designated survivors... so trite. Even the boomerang laser swords fail to entice more than a yawn of derision in the general struggle for first place in the silly tropes top ten list. Just... avoid it.

With all the resources that obviously went into making those movie, you would have thought that they worth have started with a storyline - something to tell - and built from there. But no. Nothing really happens and continues to not happen until the very end. In between the very long streaks of boredom some dramatic scenes have been added to keep the audience from dozing off or plain turning off the TV, but the events are pointless, leads nowhere, does not forward the nonexistent story. In the end it just ends as confusingly void of meaning as it started and you're left wondering how this waste of resources ever managed to make a journey longer than from the writer's desk to the wastebasket at the door.