A Star Wars film that's dull?

Rating: 5/10 (1 August 1999)

I'm not going to go off on a rant about Jar Jar. OK, he's an annoying character, but Lucas seems fairly comfortable with that fact.
No, the thing that surprised me was just how bored I was with the film. Beyond a few fight scenes featuring Qui Gon Jinn and Kenobi fighting federation robots, I can't really recall anything to set the pulse racing.
Oh, I forgot. The Pod Race. Somehow I have this image of George Lucas popping over to his Lucasarts Games division and asking "What's a really popular genre of computer games we haven't yet tried?". I tend to view that sequence as the worlds most expensive video game commercial.
This, coupled with the lack of a decent enemy (what does Darth Maul DO?), makes for a very unsatisfying movie. In fact, halfway through I actually caught myself looking at my watch. I haven't done that in a film for a long time.