Solo: A Star Wars Story *** (2018, Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke) – Movie Review 

Director: Ron Howard’s 2018 Solo: A Star Wars Story is okay as a pleasant time-passer and has some enjoyable sequences and entertaining characters. But it is a bit sticky and stodgy in places, and it fails to spark up fully as a hoped-for dynamic and thrilling sci-fi action adventure. Though welcome and nice enough, it is a popcorn movie, kind of bland, disposable and forgettable.

Very old fashioned, intentionally so, I suppose, in a creaky retro sort of way, Solo relies heavily on the captive audience’s sentimental feelings about Star Wars. And that is understandable and fine. But Solo is a little bit dull and a little bit deja-vu, and lacks magic. It is starting to feel like we are reaching saturation point with Star Wars, and that it is time to move on.

Alden Ehrenreich looks the part as the young Han Solo, and he is pleasant company, but he needs more practice with the one-liners. Come to that, the one-liners need to be better, much better. He needs the action plus comedic skills combination of Chris Pratt to make Solo work, and the film falls heavily on his shoulders. Ehrenreich might just about get by on his cheesy grin, it’s a winning killer smile, but it isn’t enough to carry an entire film.

There is not much of a plot to speak of, just a series of incidents and encounters. Solo loses his girl Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke), then encounters Beckett (Woody Harrelson) and Val (Thandie Newton), the evil villain Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany), his future hairy co-pilot Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), and the notorious gambler Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover). The movie finishes inconclusively, hoping for Solo 2 of course. Neither the ‘not much of a plot’ thing nor the ‘finishes inconclusively thing’ are a help to enjoyment or satisfaction, making it feel like an extended TV episode. The screenplay by Jonathan Kasdan and Lawrence Kasdan has its plus points but it just is not strong enough, both storywise and dialoguewise, to carry the weight of the 135 minute edifice.

On the positive side, Harrelson and Bettany are both good value, giving their familiar turns another workout, though that does make the already cosy and familiar Star Wars stuff seem even more cosy and familiar. Ron Howard gives his film a robust tone, with plenty of sequences of strong sci-fi action and violence, killing off some of its characters rather ruthlessly, that helps take away the cosiness and makes the movie quite a bit more edgy and exciting. It is a crisp, efficient, seamless piece of film-making, and visually strikingly good looking, as we expect from Ron Howard.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review 

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