If
there is one thing that the highly fickle and fragmented Star Wars fandom
can agree on, it’s that the only thing good to come out of 1978’s
infamous Star Wars Holiday Special was the mysterious bounty
hunter known as Boba Fett (and arguably Mark Hamill’s Carol Brady haircut). The
cold-blooded killer’s screentime after this coke-fueled and bizarre debut was
minimal, having just a few lines in the original Star Wars trilogy
before being unceremoniously thrown into a sarlacc pit, but his staying power
(and ability to sell toys) was undeniable. It would take over forty years since
his introduction to get his own spinoff, however, and that spinoff is the
sometimes boring, sometimes awesome, sometimes unfocused Book of Boba
Fett, a Disney+ original/spinoff of The Mandalorian.
Sixty-one-year-old
Temuera Morrison stars as the roughly 41-year-old Boba Fett after previously
playing his father/clone template Jango (as well as other clones) in the Star
Wars prequel trilogy. Along for the ride is Ming-Na Wen, reprising her
roll as master assassin Fennec Shand from The Mandalorian, as well
as a couple of new characters that you probably won’t care about and a few that
will only be familiar if you’re a fan of the Star Wars comics
and animated series (one from the latter I was particularly jazzed about, but
that would be a spoiler). There’s not too much to the story: After the events
of Return of the Jedi Boba slowly gets his groove back,
decides he wants to retire from bounty hunting and become a crime boss but
comes into conflict with a rival syndicate, and western standoffs and sci-fi
explosions ensue. The first four episodes or so are rather boring, relying far
too much on flashbacks to pad the barebones “present-day” storyline, which
mostly consists of talking and posturing, and the action varies greatly in
quality as well. There isn’t really an excuse for this latter complaint because
while the lead is 61, he also plays a character that wears a helmet and could
therefore be played by a stuntman for a good deal of the time (the same is true
of Wen, who is supposedly 58 but must have an aging portrait sitting in her
attic ala Dorian Gray or Paul Rudd). To be fair, the action is not all
underwhelming, just inconsistent (as the awesome train scene will attest), and
in episode five things finally start to pick up instead of merely chugging
along.
The
only problem? The titular character is completely absent in one of those three
final episodes, is barely in another, and has to share focus in the third. It
is when The Book of Boba Fett is no longer about Boba
Fett that the series gets really good, which is a downright shame considering
how long he has waited to get his own spinoff. These last episodes are not
awesome because they are furthering Boba’s story, but because they are
furthering other stories in the Star Wars galaxy. This alone
makes The Book of Boba Fett worth watching, but it would have
been nice to have these stories told elsewhere to tighten the focus of the
show. Boba deserves better.
Also,
there is no book. The title is a lie.
All
seven episodes of The Book of Boba Fett are now available
on Disney+.
This review was first published in The Keizertimes on February 18th, 2022. Visit at http://keizertimes.com/
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