A huge but un even rollercoaster ride of entertainment and disappointment

Rating: 7/10 (18 December 2017)

Star Wars the last Jedi is a very long movie, and there was ample room for cuts, witness the jarring and completely pointless scene of Luke drinking raw seal milk on the beach... uh... yeah....
We are treated to amazing visuals, and some fantastic scenes. The death of Snoke was very satisfying, even if it made no sense from a story perspective.
The humor was in places very funny (Chewy and his roast chicken) and in places extremely awkward (the milk drinking scene as mentioned above)
Luke does a serviceable job in the end of what he is portraying, a shell-shocked hermit who has lost most of his high hopes for the Jedi but tries to cling to the origins, namely the Force.
Daisey is at times well done, her trip into the cave of darkness, and at other times clumsy and ham-fisted (her pathetic attempts to convince Luke to join her by physically assaulting the poor old man).
We have new characters that just.. do not fly. I know with the MASSIVE Chinese investment of audience now for these movies, it is essential that Disney get more Chinese characters in play (rather overdue and racistly so...) but the new Chinese character, Tran, is not doing it, her acting is atrocious and her hair-do is an abomination.
And Laura Dern.... I have no IDEA what they were thinking with this one.... and it fails miserably. Every second of her screen time is cringe-worthy.
Then again, throwing in big name actors turns around and actually WORKS with Benicio Del Toro, even if his lispy stutter doesn't. The man has GRAVITAS and he brings it to an otherwise luke-warm (lol) showing.
The writing is uneven as well. I actually am starting to like Adam Driver (blasphemous as those words are) and his story arc. Finn OTOH though, continues to plod along as the love-sick b/f. He even get's a completely useless comedy scene of him staggering around in a giant suit of saline solution which only serves to ridicule his character.
Poe is played strangely here, he is clearly an audience favorite, but the Rebels go around hating on him constantly. It is very annoying and could only have been explained if Laura Dern's character was an Empire Agent, which, sadly, she is not.
And finally a huge GEEK RAGE OUT on the DEUS EX MACHINA of using a hyper-jump to destroy an entire fleet of Star Destroyers. Why doesn't this destroy all fleets that hyperjump together then? We all know for the entire Star Wars series entire fleets of ships have hyper-jumped together. So now all of a sudden this causes a huge explosion that destroys all the ships??? It made ZERO sense, and then to have the flagship, which has literally been torn into TWO PIECES, still have the ability to land a AT-AT assault unit???
THAT is SLOPPY WRITING.