Let's start with what they got right. The Mandalorian TV show was a Western set in space, about a bounty hunter who finds his conscience, and his purpose, when he finds an orphan boy and adopts him as his protege. In that spirit, this movie is a classic Western story: Mando is hired to rescue the nephew of gangsters, the job goes sideways, and ultimately he betrays the gangsters and makes more trouble for himself in the name of Doing The Right Thing. I can picture Jon Favreau and his Lucasfilm crew saying "even if Grandma takes the grandkids to see this, they'll get what's happening too".
The tone is light, the violence isn't too scary for the littles, although it was odd watching a gladiator battle where nobody loses a limb, and no blood is shed. There used to be a time where a limb was chopped off in every Star War!
The movie starts with a bang: I am a big believer in opening set pieces, to entertain the audience until the main storyline gets interesting. If you saw the battle with the Imperial Walkers in the trailer - that sequence is the pre-title action.
Here's where I'm dissatisfied [spoilers ahead]:
While I understand and endorse the impulse to make this movie as accessible to non-fans as possible, the movie includes zero Star Wars lore, nearly no connection to the overarching New Republic vs Old Empire drama, no mystery about Grogu and his people or his powers, nothing about the Mandalorians. There's literally only one character from the TV show besides Mando and Grogu, and it's a tiny part. The TV show was built on stories like "Mando needs A, but he must take B to find C, who will trade D for E" stories, none of which were connected to the lore, but this movie was just a side quest. Mando and Grogu come out the far side unchanged.
The Hutts. Jabba The Hutt was a giant space slug / crime kingpin in Return Of The Jedi. He was the product of a brilliant puppeteer team. And then he was strangled and blew up. Since 1983, the Star Wars universe has extrapolated that character into a whole galaxy of Jabba's space slug relatives who are all gangsters too. Aunts, Uncles, nephews, babies, and so on. The Star Wars universe has a tendency to borrow authenticity from what came before: Alec Guiness wore brown terrycloth robes, so all Jedi wear them from now on. Darth Vader was the best bad guy? It turns out "Darth" is actually a title of all bad guys. Jabba the Hutt was a cool gangster? Turns out there's more slug gangsters. It feels like the producers are both buying my loyalty with nostalgia, but also safeguarding their creative choices by dressing them in authentic George Lucas costumes.
Maybe I wouldn't mind so much if all the Hutts since 1983 weren't such obvious CGI and so inferior to the all-puppet Jabba in Return Of The Jedi. When "slave girl" Leia falls back in defeat against Jabba's leathery torso, Carrie Fisher really did that. When Jabba dropped a frog in his mouth, that was a real prop frog and real drool. When Leia throws her chains around Jabba's "neck" and strangles him, Fisher was interacting with an actual puppet. I think the Star Wars movies, like many franchises, has made a bad bargain. The deal goes like this: if you animate Rotta The Hutt with a computer, you can have his character battle in a gladiator ring, BUT that means you have to use the CGI Rotta in every scene, including simple dialog scenes where a puppet would be easy and more convincing.
I have read criticisms that the movie feels flat and badly-lit, but I would say the problem is that a featture film based on a TV show should be bigger and more expensive than the show, and instead, The Mandalorian and Grogu only feels exactly like a couple episodes of the show. Lucasfilm invented The Volume, this giant egg lined with video screens, which enables them to film their scenes with dynamic lighting and backgrounds, without having to leave the soundstage. This technology makes Mando's reflective armor possible, and it made the broad universe of the TV show affordable, but we all paid to see this movie, and what did we get? Maybe I made a mistake in watching Tombstone and Troy right after this - two movies shot on location. Watching Kurt Russell and Brad Pitt squint into the sun for four hours adds a ton of production value that The Volume trades off for economy. Yes, in the end, The Mandalorian and Grogu feels like a feature film made on the tightest budget possible. It would have been an expensive pain the ass to go to beaches and jungles to film this movie. Building a "space New York" set like the one in the movie would have been more work than building it in a computer. But the end result would have been memorable. The movie we got feels like a economy afterthought, made years after the TV show lost its momentum and relevance, by a studio that barely makes movies anymore.