The Han-made tale

Standalone adventure is a frothy but flawed tale of how a naive adventurer became the Star Wars saga’s cynical and charismatic smuggler

A FTER Rian Johnson’s Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi propelled George Lucas’s saga into a galaxy far, far away from the old-fashioned charm of the original trilogy, Solo: A Star Wars Story slingshots it in the opposite direction.

Scripted by Jonathan Kasdan and his father Lawrence, cowriter of The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi, this sketches the formative years of the charismatic scoundrel Han Solo in comforting, broad strokes.

Ron Howard captains the hulking ship after directorial duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were tossed into a sarlacc pit over ‘creative differences’ a few months into production. Behind-the-scenes turmoil hasn’t manifested noticeably on screen.

Solo’s name is emboldened in the title but he’s the least interesting element and Alden Ehrenreich’s performance falls short of the rascally delights of Harrison Ford. fdhgdsjhfg fjhgf

Instead, London-born actress jgfhfghf dhgdh Phoebe Waller-Bridge, creator of hsdghsdfg hddfhgdh award-winning comedy Fleabag, shines brightest through the digitally rendered gloom as a rebellious droid, who is hardwired to demand equal rights for her mechanised kin.

A nifty prologue set on the ship-building planet Corellia illustrates the doomed romance of Han (Ehrenreich) and sweetheart Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke).

Three years later, after a cute meeting with Wookiee sidekick Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), Han seeks a route back to Corellia by hijacking a consignment of crystal fuel coaxium with thief-for-hire Tobias Beckett (Woody Harrelson) and his accomplices Val (Thandie SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY (12A) Newton) and Rio (voiced by Jon Favreau). The heist doesn’t unfold as planned and the reprobates become indebted to Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany), leader of a crime syndicate.

Thus, Han and Beckett reluctantly undertake a more dangerous assignment: to steal canisters of coaxium from Kessel. To accomplish this seemingly impossible feat, the thieves must wrest the Millennium Falcon from smuggler Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) and his deadpan droid L3-37 (Waller-Bridge).

The series’ chronologyseverely limits the number of characters who can sustain serious injury. Consequently, there’s scant dramatic tension. A lean script provides one-liners to underscore Han and Chewie’s jocular banter and Glover has fun with his flirtatious chancer.

“I’ve got a good feeling about this,” grins Han as he sits in the captain’s chair for the first time, a neat reversal of Luke Skywalker’s famous line in Episode IV: A New Hope.

I harboured similar feelings of quiet optimism for Howard’s film but like the Millennium Falcon, when she emerges from the Kessel run, my expectations were badly dented.