Good in parts, but trying too hard to be 'Marvel funny' (ie, not funny) was too distracting

Rating: 4/10 (21 December 2017)

By the end of The Last Jedi, it seems Rian Johnson still hadn't figured out what tone he wanted for it. The film clumsily jumps from serious to embarrassingly unfunny slapstick humour every few minutes. It really feels like he never watched the original Star Wars films more than once, and doesn't understand its characters. The humour in Star Wars always came from the natural personality of its characters, look at the Han Solo "boring conversation anyway" line, it was a funny moment that felt natural (because it actually was) and completely fit the tone of the film, as well as the person saying it. In TLJ, Rian Johnson wrote a lot of scenes with lame gags, silly faces and people falling over and just pasted them on to his actors. Why do screenwriters now arrogantly assume they can just suddenly write comedy? If you read the reviews of critics, apparently being "Marvel funny" is actually something to aspire to! Anybody I've seen defending the jokes in this have countered it with "but Star Wars has always had funny lines" - and NONE of them can tell the difference between the embarrassing 'Amanda Show' style slop we're served up here and Leia referring to Chewie as a walking carpet in anger.
I've spent a lot of time talking about the attempted comedy, but honestly it was so relentless and badly executed that it completely took me out of the film. Luke dusting off his shoulder like John Cena? Godawful. What are we gonna see in episode IX, Chewbacca dabbing?! For the first time since I saw A New Hope as a young boy 26 years ago, I don't care about the next Star Wars film.
It's only the 2nd movie in this trilogy, and ALREADY they've run out of things for Finn to do. They send him off on a pointless side-quest where he and Rose achieve nothing whatsoever, and seemed like a badly handled attempt to crowbar some "social justice" into Star Wars. The casino scene, on the whole, is one of the most bizarre, ridiculous, out of place scenes to feature in all of Star Wars (possibly only being beaten in sheer lack of belonging in Star Wars by the 50's diner in the prequel trilogy), and the movie really took a nosedive in quality during this whole segment. Total filler that existed only to pad out the film's running time. As much I genuinely like Laura Dern, her purple haired Desperate Housewives style cougar was hilariously unconvincing as an admiral. For all the failed jokes, the biggest laugh I got during this whole film was during the 'Leia floating through space' scene, truly hilarious! They didn't even get Yoda right! Why was he a mischievous, immature imp? Because he was at the start of Empire? That was before he revealed himself as a Jedi master, then his demeanour completely changed. Yoda isn't ACTUALLY a giggling little gremlin. Rian Johnson, WATCH THE ORIGINAL TRILOGY AGAIN!
It did redeem itself with basically any scene involving Rey/Kylo/Luke, I was pulled in and invested in that story. I thought the Rey mirror scene was pretty cool, and it was something a little different that actually worked! But again, like most things in this film... it didn't come to anything. I have no real problems with Luke dying, or how it happened. His scene with Kylo was genuinely entertaining, and I felt like we were getting a gilmpse of what a good mid 90's sequel with Luke kicking tush might have looked like. Ultimately though, nothing happened in this whole 2 and a half hours. No one achieved anything, everyone is exactly where they started, The First Order are still chasing the rebels, Rey is still looking for someone to be her father figure, Finn has nothing going on, Poe is... there, Phasma is dead again.
Sadly, Rian Johnson couldn't make his mind up on what he wanted this film to be. It could have been 40 minutes shorter, had maybe 3 well written jokes and been able to contend against the original trilogy. Instead it's a tonally inconsistent, messy film that only teased us with what could have been.