Nonsense plot, cheap dialogue/characters, but still entertaining

Rating: 7/10 (12 December 2019)

Spoiler-free review as maybe there's someone out there who's still not seen it and not read any spoilers (as if!).
This is the best Star Wars film that's not the original trilogy.
Bit of background: the original trilogy, all three of them, are among the finest films ever made. Tho' we're only counting the orginal cuts here, none of the special editions which cheapened them (keyword: Despecialized).
Since then, it's been pretty mediocre stuff. The prequel trilogy are all bang-average, even the slightly-lauded RotS is only merely ok due to being hammy as hell, but at least the prequels gave us lots of fresh world-building. Force Awakens was mild forgettable fun but completely uninspired. Rogue One had potential tho' personally I found it a chore to get through. Haven't seen Solo yet.
It took me two years to finally get round to watching Last Jedi for the first time...I didn't care about it, so knew all the major plotpoints. Going from the various critical youtube reviews it sounded like I shouldn't bother wasting my time.
But honestly, because my expectations were so low, I ended up enjoying it despite all its problems. Those critical-reviews are mostly correct in their observations, but they're too harsh in their overall judgement. I'd compare Last Jedi with the controversial Long Night episode of Game of Thrones:

stupid inconsistent logic.
over-familiar plot but done in a nonsensical way.
simple dumbed-down dialogue.
'subverting expectations' in not exactly clever or satisfying ways.
some übercringe moments, and moments where you're laughing at the film rather than with it (i.e. Kylo's shirtless scene...like something out of Shades of Grey haha).
yet...and most important of all: it was still very entertaining to watch the expertly-filmed carnage and high-end production.

I gave The Long Night 8/10 (the rest of Season 8 was poor). I'm giving Last Jedi 7/10 as I didn't warm to any of the characters: the antagonists are a joke, there's no sense of intimidation from any of them. And the goodies have plenty of urgency but lack charm. So it loses a point againt the GOT episode, but they're both about equally-entertaining if you turn your brain off and just enjoy the ride. The camera-work, sound design and general production values do deserve high praise tho' the soundtrack just became background noise rather than feverishly igniting the action like it did in the original trilogy.
Maybe the distance of two years, with the hype train long gone, has enabled me to enjoy this more than I would've done had I seen it at the cinema.
Lower your expectations, see it as a Star Wars tribute act, and I'm sure you can enjoy this too.