With studio-movie staple Ron Howard taking over from directing duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller (21 Jump Street, The Lego Movie), who were dismissed halfway through the film’s production, this Han Solo spin-off ends up a blandly appealing romp. We learn about Solo’s golden dice, as glimpsed in A New Hope, the first time he met Wookiee co-pilot Chewbacca, and exactly how he won the Millennium Falcon from smooth-talking Lando Calrissian (played with flirtatious panache by Donald Glover). Yet even at a stretched two hours, the whole thing feels like an aside – a small, low-stakes story stripped of the mythos and epic scale that make the new crop of Star Wars films land.
There’s no separating Han Solo from Harrison Ford, and indeed Alden Ehrenreich does a fine Ford impression, from his rascally smile to the actor’s sardonic, slightly smirking delivery. Less convincing is Emilia Clarke, stiff as Solo’s former girlfriend Qi’ra, and a sassy activist droid named L3 (voiced by Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge), whose comic one-liners work, but whose baiting screeds on “equal rights” for robots feel opportunistically shoehorned in.
