"We've lost the spark"

Rating: 4/10 (16 December 2017)

Leia accurately summarizes the state of Disney film-making. While, as a big-budget mainstream picture, it's incapable of being offensive or terrible, The Last Jedi tries so hard to be appealing to so many audiences that it never gets around to being good.
There are deeply troubling problems with both the plot and characters of The Last Jedi. These are apparent right away, as Poe, the remake of Harrison Ford's rebel with a cause, begins the movie flatly delivering a series of bad jokes. I emphasize "bad". It's not that the jokes are cheesy; the original trilogy contained its fair share of that. It's the unbearable throwaway groaners that are the common stock of Marvel movies and are slowly infiltrating the rest of Disney's output in the name of pleasing the crowd. And it wouldn't even matter so much that the jokes were bad, if they had at least the redeeming feature of reflecting some aspect of Poe's character. They do not. Instead, these generic lines are split almost evenly among the cast, and even the film's most dramatic moments and serious characters are regularly stripped of their power through a misplaced gag.
And this tone-deafness of the film is just the beginning. Rian Johnson never quite manages to achieve a single coherent character arc in The Last Jedi. For sure, decisions are made, but they're never motivated, and we're left feeling as though our heroes end up where they do for no better reason than the plot's demands.
The plot itself is too full of holes to be called formulaic. Ships and their captains sit around doing nothing in the midst of battles, characters disappear from one place to reappear unexplained in another, and a solid third of the plot turns out to have no real bearing on the rest of the story. If this were Guardians of the Galaxy, one might be okay with this, since in Marvel films the narrative is merely the vehicle for the delivery of humor. But this (one would have hoped) is not a Marvel film.
It's not all bad. The movie is technically well made, with really excellent sound design and great additions to the canonical Star Wars score. Daisy Ridley shines, really reaching above the script she's given. The subplot featuring Ridley and Ren stands out as the one truly good part of the film, capped by an excellent set piece. And Laura Durn turns in a remarkable performance in support of a minor character.
Go see it; you were probably going to anyway. But prepare yourself. This is Disney's cash cow now, and they'll milk it for all it's worth.