Disney and J.J. go into full-on Schlock Mode!

Rating: 5/10 (26 December 2019)

The two words that came to me watching this enjoyable mess were "desperate" and "cowardly".
Desperate because the film tried so hard to please everyone by working in so many characters and references that it completely lost focus. With BB-8, R2D2, and C3PO, we just have too many damn robots. So what do they do? They add in yet another one! We lost our big and bad female stormtrooper Phasma but replaced her with two new pointless female characters (a bounty huntress and a former storm trooper) who both only seem to exist to give Poe and Finn someone to have chemistry with aside from each other. Rey is still doing her own thing, so overpowered and invulnerable that the film creaks along with a total absence of tension...
...which leads me to the Cowardly aspect. The film pulls absolutely every punch from the start. Remember when Finn almost killed himself in The Last Jedi, only to get rescued from it at the very last second? Well here we get at least 3 instances where a character makes a brave sacrifice only for their "death" to be undone in the very next scene! It's as though Disney just can't kill off any of the main characters no matter what happens. The emperor shows up again, because "duh, what else were they gonna do?" However the moral conundrum he puts before Rey gets solved in the blandest way possible, which would never have even been a problem for him had he not just announced his plan to her seconds earlier just like a Bond Villain.
I really cracked up at his new ability to summon star destroyers at will, complete with loyal crews on several vessels. There's a ton of throwaway, possibly ADR'ed afterthought-lines thrown in here and there by offscreen characters such as "it's time to recruit more children on planets to serve in my fleet" but later a character says "they're going to deploy their fleet in 17 hours!". Well hell, those child-slave star destroyer crewmen grow up quick! I guess a lot can be accomplished when you go at light speed while Relativity makes time freeze for everyone else (when it serves the plot). However the rules of light speed, warp speed, hyperspace, etc. come to make absolutely no sense in context to the plot and what happens during the last act of the movie. Apparently it's just as easy for the heroes to summon a good guy fleet into existence in mere hours when all they need is "hope"! Luckily, for all the star destroyers the First Order had when the movie started, they couldn't spare any to defend their new fleet at its most vulnerable moment? Or spare a few extra control towers in case one gets destroyed?
These plot holes and contrivances come on fast and furious like every other plot element in the film. It would get annoying if it wasn't so quick that one literally has no time to think about it... just like an Umberto Lenzi crimer like THE TOUGH ONES or one of Kinji Fukasaku's Yakuza movies. It's not helped here that there's already too many characters but the film finds time to dump in plenty of new ones (in addition to the ones already mentioned) as well as so many ghost cameos of the old gang that it actually becomes funny after a while.
What a mess. It's disappointing that we never got to see the gang all back together as we had hoped before this new series came to theaters. Instead, we get all these bland new characters who never go on any arc and don't have any flaws or motivations at all. Adam Driver stands as the bright spot here but even his character suffers from Rian Johnson and J.J. Abrams pulling a tug-o-war on him over three movies. In the end, this franchise will make its money, but at the cost of having me, or any of the other fans of the original films, ever take the Star Wars brand seriously again. Worth watching for mindless fun, some laughs, and ultimately to join in on the conversation of why these movies didn't work.