Flying Solo for fun adventure
Alden Ehrenreich, Emilia Clarke, Donald Glover, Paul Bettany, Phoebe WallerBridge Cometh the hour, cometh the Han
DO we positively, absolutely, really need a stand-alone adventure like Solo: A Star Wars Story right now?
No, not really. But there is a hell of lot of enjoyable, throwaway fun to be had finding that out.
If you want this origin tale of how Han Solo got his start in the wise-cracking fly-boy business to be packed with deep and meaningful mentions of the Force, or fresh cannon fodder about the Jedi way, you’ve come to the wrong place.
However, if you want the upbeat lowdown on when Han first met Chewbacca, got the keys to the Millennium Falcon, or acquired his legendary skills as a maverick pilot — making friends, enemies and mischief along the way — then you are definitely in the right place.
The Solo storyline tracks to about a decade before the events of where Star Wars started ( Episode IV — A New Hope), which places Han’s age roughly in his early 20s.
Han (played convincingly enough by the relatively unknown Alden Ehrenreich) starts out as a small-time grafter, trying to get the money together to buy his own space ride so he can get back to his home planet of Corellia and rescue his girlfriend Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke from Game of Thrones).
After a tumultuous first encounter with Chewie almost results in bloodshed, Han falls in with a bunch of rogues (led by Woody Harrelson as cunning crook Tobias Beckett) that will teach him all about talking, blasting or flying his way out of any situation.
For a Star Wars movie, Solo is particularly light on for treacherous villains (or at least those prepared to conduct their villainy out in the open). The only bad dude worth paying any attention to is a nefarious playboy gangster named Dreyden Vos (Paul Bettany), and he only gets two scenes to strut his sinister stuff.
As for plotting wildcards, most of those are held by the charismatic intergalactic gambler, debonair dresser and onetime legendary pilot Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover of TV’s Atlanta).
While the plotting is fastpaced and fun when purely character-based, the many action sequences do get a bit samey (and are the reason why the running time goes well past the two-hour mark).
On the plus side, Solo: A Star Wars Story marks more of a return to A New Hope’s rollicking, Saturday adventure matinee roots than any other of the “modern” Star Wars movies to date.