Solo: A Star Wars Story
Well, that was unnecessary.
Solo: A Star Wars Story is like the tiny heart tattoo on a sorority girl’s ankle. It’s there because she just really wanted something, but she had nothing original or deep to say. This is 135 minutes of movie-shaped pile of shit deeply from the galaxy far, far away. It’s point is as dull as the cornflower Crayola in a kindergarten class.
Scruffy rogue Han Solo is the best character from the original Star Wars movies. He’s crusty and self-serving but ultimately does the right thing. He’s got the best lines, the best smirk and the best character arc, from bastard to hero. There are strands of his history dangling in the movies and giving us just enough information to know who he is: his debt to Jabba, his relationship with Lando Calrissian. Those sharp but minimal details give him a mystique.
Solo shits on that mystique. It’s a schmaltzy backstory spun like cotton candy, not to make us better understand the character, but rather to cash in on it while sucking the marrow out of what made Han Solo cooler than the Fonz. Fuckers.
Imagine seeing a girl across the room at a party and she has a Bandaid on her chin. Your first thought is she is pretty. Then you wonder why the Bandaid. You keep looking, and she gets prettier each time you do. Also more intriguing. What the fuck is up with her chin? And what kind of girl wears a strapless summer dress and a Bandaid? She’s either got brass balls or she just doesn’t give a fuck. Either of those options is extremely attractive.
Imagine you actually speak to her, and first she tells you how much she hates immigrants and dwarves. Then she talks about how the Earth is flat. Finally, she reveals that she has the Bandaid because of a large mole from which a hair grows that is as thick and dark as pencil lead, and she nicked herself while whittling it off that morning. The mystique is gone. She doesn’t seem so pretty anymore, does she?
This is why I never talk to girls at parties, at meetings, at the library, or anywhere else. I’d rather jerk off to who I imagine them to be than who they really are. And this is why I hate Solo: the background I didn’t know is way fucking better than the one Hollywood boiled up.
The movie starts with Solo (Aidan Ehrenreich) as Oliver Twist, a waif on the streets of a dingy world hustling for his daily bowl of porridge. He is teamed up with Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke). Their story is run-of-the-mill star-crossed lover bullshit. When they try to escape their situation, he succeeds and she gets stuck. He promises to come back for her then embarks on a quest to earn the money needed to do just that. This doesn’t explain the Han Solo we know. It explains the protagonist from a Hallmark Channel movie.
It sure as fuck doesn’t help that Ehernreich, and the script, are lifeless turds. There is no joy, no fun, nothing crisp. He’s just a boring-ass dude going through the motions of a script that is also going through the emotions.
Solo hooks up with mercenary Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson) to rob a train. What the hell kind of Star Wars name is Tobias Beckett? Did some asshole named Toby win a silent auction on a Disney Cruise?
Toby and Solo rob the train for Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany), a villain who flounces around his ballroom a lot and seems more likely to intentionally mislabel sea bass than to rule the universe. He also happens to be boning more than just deceptive fish; he’s hooking up with a now free Qi-ra. What a coincidence! But Vos has his own problem, Enfy’s Nest. That is not an IoT device for monitoring babies. It’s a pirate on a speeder bike who likes to plunder Vos’s shit.
Nest has a cause; her people have been enslaved and killed by Vos. Because Solo is all about turning the Han Solo we love from lovable rogue to generic sap, Han sympathizes with her and her band of marauders. Remember, he too was once a helpless little waif. Personally, I would like him better if his backstory was that he was a rich kid asshole who turned into a thief for the kicks. That way, his redemption in the original movie is the real one. Thanks to this dopey movie, the power of that moment is greatly reduced. He didn’t need to redeem himself; he was just misunderstood!
There is almost nothing at stake in Solo. There is plenty of action, including chases, shit blowing up, and the Millennium Falcon outrunning Tie Fighters. But it means almost nothing, and a lot of it has been seen before. The Falcon goes through a debris field, dodges a giant monster’s mouth, gets beaten up and keeps going. Ron Howard directs it with about as much energy as Chili’s waiters singing you happy birthday at closing time on a Wednesday. He also makes easily avoidable mistakes, like having a scramble for a loose gun and good guys who hit their targets without ever getting hit.
It’s all flat, with no emotional highs and lows, very little at stake and even less rising tension. Of course, part of that is because Ehrenrich is such a shitty actor with the emotional range of a four-year-old on Benadryl. Part of it, though, is the grinding, relentless musical score that just will not shut the fuck up, and is often at odds with the action.
About the only time the movie has fun is when Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) is on the screen. He is the cocksure, smirking con man that Solo is supposed to be. He looks like the only guy having any fun. The problem there is we get not one, but two, poker scenes where his savvy is defined the same way it would be for a Lee Marvin character in a shitty 60s crime movie. Poker scenes almost always suck and involve impossibly good hands and reversals where one guy thinks for sure he won until the hero reveals a better hand. These scenes are of a card game whose cards are foreign to us, so we can’t even play along.
Only in its last thirty minutes did I start to think Solo wasn’t a completely train wreck. And now, a couple days later I can’t even remember what happened. Two Fingers. They should have left the Bandaid on Han's chin forever.