The Acolyte

So far, The Acolyte is a couple of rungs below the best Star Wars live action series – Andor and The Mandalorian deserve that accolade – but it’s on the right trajectory. Our new hope is that the back half of the season sticks the landing.

It’s a spirited effort, but in the continuum of Disney’s Star Wars hits and misses, The Acolyte lands bang in the middle.

A Star Wars mystery that interests rather than intrigues, this is spiced up nonetheless by a brand-new setting, some arresting Force-fu and a Wookiee with a lightsaber.

Unlike Andor – easily the best of the Star Wars spin-offs – The Acolyte is a pulled punch, too eager to play the story out in a series of five-minute jeopardy riffs rather than trust that the audience might have an attention span. There are teasing hints of what it could be.

Taken on its own terms, The Acolyte does offer some enjoyable character dynamics and an enticing mystery, but its first four episodes fail to coalesce into something that truly shines. But look, it does have a wookiee Jedi, and that’s always a plus.

The umpteenth example of the fact that not all sagas need go on indefinitely—and especially not via formulaic prequels.

The various plot mechanisms take about one and a half episodes to fully build up momentum, but once that happens, “The Acolyte” becomes a lot more intriguing. Still, the question remains: Do fans have the appetite for yet another “Star Wars” spinoff only fleetingly connected to the galaxy they know?

Beneath the familiar trappings, the visceral pull that “Star Wars” can summon in its best moments — “The Empire Strikes Back,” “The Last Jedi,” parts of “Andor” and “The Mandalorian” — doesn’t manifest itself. Characters speak in platitudes about loss, grief, loyalty and revenge, and the cast mostly works down to the level of the dialogue.

Most of the pieces are uneven at best, if not simply underwhelming. Carrie-Anne Moss is used well in an opening action set piece (once again getting to work with bullet-time effects, 25 years after the first Matrix) but is otherwise wasted, and the later fight scenes aren’t as dynamic.

"Acolyte" has a great deal of potential. "The Mandalorian" made "Star Wars" a Western. "Andor" made it a revolution. "Acolyte" could have made it a great work of fantasy and mystery. But mostly it's a great big sigh.

On the evidence of the four episodes handed out to reviewers the latest effort on Disney’s Star Wars treadmill is a commendably different but uneven addition to the saga.