Star Wars: the Bad Batch review – badass clones strike back

Happy Star Wars Day! What started out as a throwaway joke by a Twitter wag – earning several retweets and a handful of likes for being the first Star Wars nut to say “May the fourth be with you” on 4 May – has snowballed in the past few years and is now a fixture on the calendar, in the Disney marketing department at least. With no new Star Wars movie on the horizon – a root and branch inquiry into what went wrong with 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker is hopefully ongoing – Disney+ instead marks Star Wars Day 2021 with the fanboy substitute that is a new cartoon series.

Star Wars: the Bad Batch (Disney+) follows on from the long-running animated adventure Star Wars: The Clone Wars, giving a group of characters who were prominent in the final season their own show, and is set in the period between the films Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. For members of the general public considering whether to watch a sequel to a cartoon spin-off from a movie franchise, the questions are: can I watch it without being fully across all the relevant galactic folklore, and is it worth it anyway? Yes, you can, and yes, it is – barely. Not knowing who, say, Saw Gerrera or Caleb Dume are, and thus not yelping with recognition when they appear, is not a problem. Getting used to the pretensions and dramatic stiffness of these animations, which never seem quite sure how old the ideal viewer is, might be more of a barrier.

The basics: the conflict depicted in The Clone Wars has come to an end, and the Galactic Empire that Luke Skywalker and friends will one day fight against is taking ominous shape. This burgeoning autocracy is using cloned humans to eliminate the pesky Jedi and their annoying moral code, branding them traitors who must be executed under a diktat called Order 66. But it hasn’t reckoned with a crack, maverick, elite, rogue and really quite notably badass gang of mutant clones who, due to their minor genetic defects, have a particular set of skills and a tendency to deviate from the exact parameters of any mission they are given.

In an outrageous bit of narrative over-emphasis, these renegades with a penchant for turning Order 66 upside down are known as Clone Force 99. They are Expendable X-Men, an interstellar A-Team, and they are about to get into a series of scrapes on our behalf. The 70-minute pilot trudges through setting up their unsubtly disparate characters: the square-jawed but flawed leader, the super-strong but childish one, the nerdy genius, and the pale, narrow-eyed one who complains icily when the others won’t let him kill innocent bystanders.

You can forgive some slightly broad voice acting once you know that the whole group is played by one actor, Dee Bradley Baker. Harder to cope with is the dialogue, which – not unusually for cartoons like this – keeps making cringeworthy stabs at maturity, like a teenager in a bow tie. It is forever lapsing into a sort of trainee sarcasm, a zone where, “You can say that again!”, “First time for everything!” and “Well, I’m convinced!” are deemed the sort of burning put-downs that pass muster within a top-level mercenary crew.

But we are here for the action, not the nuances of the script, and the opening episode has a couple of corking set pieces. Take, for example, the scene where the Bad Batch have to prove themselves to grey-hearted imperial assistant manager Admiral Tarkin – later in his nefarious career, when he has become Darth Vader’s boss, he is played by Peter Cushing in the original Star Wars movie and, pleasingly, heis drawn here to resemble him – by engaging in a fire fight with killer robots. An exciting extended shootout, and an escape from a jail cell that looks impregnable but is monitored by dopey guards, is the sort of impossible defiance of peril that made The Mandalorian such a blast. There is one proper belly laugh, too, when a dispute in a spaceship canteen with a horde of regular, identikit clones suddenly and messily escalates.

By the end of the first chapter, some necessary personnel changes have been made and the Batch are warping tall, established as rebels who have cocked an irreversible snook at the evil empire. They are probably not enough to make you feel the “fourth” and celebrate Star Wars Day if you weren’t planning to, but they just about earn their space.