Obi-Wan Kenobi (Disney +): The Final Verdict

****THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS!!! THIS IS NOT A SPOILER FREE ARTICLE!!!!****

Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Disney + money-grab of a mini-series has finally come to its miserable conclusion.

I wrote a wholly negative review of the first three episodes of the show and remarkably the series managed to make the last three episodes even worse than the first three.

A drunk toddler playing with its feces in a bathtub has more commitment to narrative coherence than the makers of Obi-Wan Kenobi. It’s not hyperbole to say that Obi-Wan Kenobi is so illogical, idiotic and imbecilic as to be insulting.

For example, not once, not twice, but three times in this series, a character is killed/left for dead and then comes back to life.

Reva Sevander (played by the impossibly awful actress Moses Ingram) dramatically “kills” the Grand Inquisitor (Rupert Friend) by stabbing him with her light saber…and then he pulls a Lazarus and shows up again later. Darth Vader slices and dices Reva with his light saber but then, for some completely inconceivable reason, doesn’t finish her but just walks away and she goes on to no doubt get a shitty spin-off series (God help us!). And then there’s the Obi Wan and Vader battle where Obi-Wan vanquishes the evil one with some fine light sabering but decides to…you guessed it, just walk away instead of killing him.

To the show’s credit, the Obi Wan – Vader fight in the finale contains some of the few visually pleasing shots in the entire anemically photographed show, but for some ungodly reason they end up turning the cinematic light saber duel into a literal rock fight. Sigh.

Besides the apparent ineffectiveness of the light saber to kill anyone, other egregious inanities abound.

For example, in the finale Vader’s star destroyer is chasing and firing upon a transport vehicle filled with every single member of a rebel group, including Obi Wan. Obi Wan, in a cringy scene with O’Shea Jackson Jr., or as I call him Li’l Ice Cube, who is so bad at acting he makes his ham-handed father Ice Cube look like Sir Laurence Olivier, decides to leave the ship to distract Vader.

Obi-Wan then jets off in a small shuttle and Vader says ‘go after him instead of the rebel transport’. The Grand Inquisitor wisely retorts, ‘hey, we can kill the entire resistance right now if we go after the transport…’, and Vader says, ‘nah…let’s take this big star destroyer and follow Obi Wan instead’. Of course, anyone with half a brain in their head would say, ‘hey Darth, why don’t you go after Obi Wan in your own ship and we’ll kill the rebels?’  But no, that makes too much sense.

So then what happens? The star destroyer follows Obi Wan to some planet and then Vader says, ‘hey everybody, I’m gonna take my own ship down to the planet because I want to fight Obi Wan alone!’ If I were working on that star destroyer Vader would most definitely have strangled me because I would’ve told him, ‘Hey genius, why didn’t you do that in the first place so we could kill the resistance and finally put an end to all this stupid bullshit and put us all out of our fucking misery?’

It's this sort of clownish, childish storytelling that makes Obi-Wan Kenobi just not brutally bad but downright offensive.

The other absurd thing about the entire enterprise is that, as I stated in my initial review, it’s based entirely on false jeopardy. Obi-Wan, Darth Vader, Leia, Luke and his aunt and uncle, are never in actual danger because we know they’re going to live to star the cavalcade of movies about their futures that we’ve all seen already.

The whole series is like an grown-up watching home movies of themselves at the beach when they were a kid and trying to convince themselves they might have been eaten by a shark. You know you weren’t eaten by a shark because you’re sitting here two decades later entirely uneaten watching videos of yourself playing in the sand.  

And of course, the acting in Obi Wan Kenobi, sans a committed Ewen McGregor, is just as atrocious in the final three episodes as it was in the first three.

For example, I kept praying that they would just replace the terrible little kid playing Leia with Peter Dinklage in a wig. And I’ve already written much about the awfulness of Moses Ingram as Reva, and God-damn she is still utterly abysmal.

The thing that horrifies me about the monument to empty tokenism that is Moses Ingram’s acting career is that the ending of Obi-Wan Kenobi makes it perfectly clear that they intend to give this lackluster character and the talentless actress who plays her a spin-off series. One can only imagine the artistic and creative depths of the Disney/Star Wars septic tank that will be dredged to bring that turd to life.

In conclusion, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a great character, but Obi-Wan Kenobi is a truly heinous and atrocious, dead-on-arrival series which, if there is any mercy in the universe, will not see a season two.

If Disney does pull the trigger and there is a season two of Obi-Wan Kenobi, and/or a spin-off Reva Sevander series, the only sane response will be to simply say…May the Force Go Fuck Itself.

©2022

Obi Wan Kenobi (Disney +) : A TV Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. The first three episodes of this pile of crap feature some of the very worst writing, performances and direction in Star Wars history. So much so that I have lost all hope that the final three will be even remotely worthwhile.

We need to talk about the new Disney Plus series Obi Wan Kenobi. I just watched the first three episodes (the only three released thus far) of the six-episode series and holy shit. It isn’t just bad, it’s absolutely, ridiculously, insanely fucking atrocious. It is a gigantic monument to artistic, creative and narrative incompetence.

To set the context of my thoughts it should be noted that I am not a Star Wars fanatic or fanboy. I am not particularly well-versed in Star Wars mythology and lore but I do find it compelling and fascinating. That said, I have seen all the films and live-action tv shows but more out of pop culture duty and/or work obligations than anything else.

My aggravation over Obi Wan Kenobi has nothing to do with some betrayal of Star Wars canon, no my anger is because the writing, casting, directing and acting (save for Ewen McGregor – who, not surprisingly, does solid work in it) is so beyond amateurish as to be offensive. I mean, how can Disney pass this steaming pile of horseshit off on audiences and expect anybody to take it, or them, seriously?

Let’s begin with the basic premise of the show. Set in between The Revenge of the Sith (the third prequel film) and A New Hope (the original Star Wars movie), the series tells the tale of Obi Wan (Ewen McGregor reprising his role from the prequel films) as he watches over young Luke Skywalker, and eventually, young Princess Leia.

As a basic storytelling venture, Obi Wan Kenobi is already at cross-purposes with itself because if you put Obi Wan and Leia in danger in the show, viewers already know they’ll survive since there are mountains of movies in the storyline set after this mini-series that audiences have already seen which proves that point. As a big wig writer in Hollywood recently told me during a discussion about the show, Obi Wan Kenobi is based entirely on “false jeopardy”, which sounds like a direct-to-video Bruce Willis action romp. So, there’s no drama created when Obi Wan and Leia are put in jeopardy in the series because we all know they aren’t really in danger because we’ve followed their storylines for forty years.

Speaking of danger, the action sequences In Obi Wan Kenobi are the worst I can remember in a film or tv series. Deborah Chow directed the entirety of the series and she is so hapless and hopeless in the director’s chair that she should not only be banned from directing ever again for the length of her natural born life, but also, as a punitive measure, be banned from watching any sort of entertainment ever again.

An example of Ms. Chow’s incompetence is a fight in episode three, the details of which I will refrain from sharing for spoiler reasons, that is so visually and viscerally anemic and so devoid of any sort of narrative logic, that it looked and felt like something a mental defective child in a North Korean prison created while playing with straw action figures.

There’s also the absurd and ridiculous sequence where ten-year-old Little Leia runs away from three adult male kidnappers and it looks like parents letting their toddler score a touchdown during a family’s Thanksgiving Day touch football game so as to avoid a tantrum. The men (who are truly dismal at pretending to chase someone) in the scene keep running into fallen trees while pursuing Leia, who is apparently the most unathletic girl in the universe, as she “runs” away from them like she’s running under forty feet of water.

The girl cast as the ten-year-old Leia is nine-year-old Vivien Lyra Blair, who besides running like a midget with polio also happens to portray the most annoying character in the Star Wars universe since Jar Jar Binks. I know Leia grows up to be a hottie in a bikini at the end of Jabba’s leash in Return of the Jedi, but I kept wishing Obi Wan would just pull out his lightsaber and slice this annoying brat in two and put us all out of our misery.

The casting of an annoying nine-year-old who looks (and runs) like a four-year-old to play a ten-year-old, isn’t the only casting atrocity in Obi Wan Kenobi.

Moses Ingram is cast as the villain Reva Sevander and is the worst adult actor to ever appear in a Star Wars film or series, which is saying a lot considering even in Obi Wan Kenobi alone film director-turned-actor Benny Safdie and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist Flea give abysmal performances in supporting roles.

Ingram’s Reva is a critical role, she’s supposed to be the big bad villain but she has all the presence of a tumbleweed. Ingram’s line readings are elementary-school-drama-class-reject level of God-awful and her inability to even remotely conjure some sort of menace is staggering to behold. The character of Reva would’ve had considerably more life to it if they had cast a cigar store wooden Indian in the role instead. The bottom line is that Moses Ingram’s performance is an absolute and utter embarrassment, so much so that, as insane as it sounds, I actually feel bad for her.

Adding to my discomfort for Ms. Ingram is the allegation that she has received racist comments on Instagram from Star Wars fans. If true, that is revolting and reprehensible. But I must say, I have my doubts about the voracity of those claims, not because I have some undying belief in the goodness of humanity…I don’t, but because I don’t trust Disney or its culture warrior minions in the slightest.

In the plethora of articles I’ve read about the alleged racist comments from rabid Star Wars fans, all but one has failed to actually share what any of the racist comments are, so I’ve yet to see them. The one article that did quote them said that Ingram has received “"hundreds" of racist and threatening messages, with one telling her "you're [sic] days are numbered" and another using the N-word.”

I find this less than compelling evidence that there is a cavalcade of racism coming at Ms. Ingram. I’m sorry but someone commenting that “you’re [sic] days are numbered” is not necessarily a racist attack, it could be someone saying that she will be fired for sucking at acting – which she should be because she does in fact suck at it.

The “n-word” comment is obviously repugnant, repulsive, egregious and disgusting, but if those two comments are the worst of the “hundreds” of allegedly awful racist ones – which the article implies that they are, then that seems like Disney and its stenographers in the establishment media and online are making a mountain out of a molehill by conflating criticism with racism.

Now why would Disney conflate criticism and racism and promote the idea that one of their minority actors is being inundated with racist attacks online? Because that helps Disney signal its woke bona fides as a diverse and inclusive company, and also acts as a way to limit any criticism of the show, even non-racist criticism, by creating the paradigm that being negative towards Obi Wan Kenobi is racist and being a supporter of the show is a way to signal anti-racist virtue.  

I, of course, could not care less about the color of Ms. Ingram’s skin, I just care if she can act or not, and the evidence I’ve seen thus far is a very compelling indictment regarding her acting ability, or more specifically, her decided lack of it.

The Moses Ingram story aside, the reality is that Obi Wan Kenobi is an utter creative disaster for Disney and its Star Wars property. If this were a one-off error than you could brush it aside. But Obi Wan Kenobi being bad and boring comes on the heels of the series The Book of Boba Fett being bad and boring. The Mandalorian was a terrific series that I greatly enjoyed, but batting .300 will get you into the hall of fame in baseball, but in the Disney Star Wars universe will get you to the hall of shame…and this doesn’t even factor in the shitty the Star Wars movies of recent years.

The same is true regarding Disney’s Marvel behemoth, which, post Endgame, has been stumbling and staggering around like a barefoot drunk on a frozen lake. The Marvel tv shows have been mostly miss, and even the hits have been mediocrities, and Disney’s Marvel movies since Endgame have been relentlessly egregious misfires.

I could not care less about the health of Disney, but the truth is that they are perilously close to shitting all over themselves and both their Star Wars and Marvel properties, to such a massive degree that they’ll never be able to remove the stink.

If the next batch of Star Wars shows coming out this year, which include Andor and Ashoka, are on the same level of bad as The Book of Boba Fett and Obi Wan Kenobi, then Disney is in deep doo-doo indeed.

That will suck for Disney, but it will suck even more for the legion of Star Wars fans, who, alleged racist assholes aside, deserve considerably better.  

©2022