Cinema Toast: ‘Solo,’ ‘Beast,’ and ‘The Rider’

Gil Mansergh reviews the latest films|

Solo: A Star Wars Story (PG-13)

Starring: Alden Ehrenreich, Joona Suotomo, Woody Harrelson, Amelia Clarke, Danny Glover, Thandie Newton, Paul Bettany, Linda Hunt

Directed by: Ron Howard

When you see Alden Ehreneich trying to fill Han Solo’s chair on the Millennium Falcon, you can’t help yourself from saying, “I watched Harrison Ford - and this guy is no Harrison Ford.” Fortunately, Danny Glover dons the swirling cape of Lando Calrissian in a style that should make Billy Dee Williams proud. The behind the camera difficulties surrounding this film cover almost a decade - with changes of screenwriters, directors and a blunt directive from the Lucasfilm president herself to place the time-tested Ron Howard in the director’s chair. The pieced-together result only partly works. In typical origin-story-style, the Lawrence and Jonathan Kasden script depicts young Han as a petty thief with a pretty girlfriend who escapes imprisonment by joining the Imperial Army, and then goes AWOL with a fur-covered chum named Chewbacca, to join a gang of thieves plotting to heist a cache of a valuable (but highly explosive) fuel, (and new, Big-Pharma laxative?) called coaxium. The overall problem is that you can see the gaps where last-minute applications of super glue just didn’t work. The difference is even more obvious in the final segments, where Ron Howard was competently in control of what we see.

2 pieces of ‘A minor blip in the Star Wars pantheon’ toast

(To read more reviews, check out Cinema Toast on PEtaluma360.com. Comments? E-mail gilmansergh@comcast.net)

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