“The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special” is a studiously inoffensive mess, being both self-conscious and desperate-to-please, but also unfocused and un-funny. While the borscht belt chaos of the first “The Star Wars Holiday Special” is an unfortunate product of creative exasperation, “The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special” and its pre-fab fan service are bland in a dismally calculated sort of way.
Set some time after the defeat of the First Order, “The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special” is divided into two equally shapeless parts: while Rose (Tran) and Poe (Jake Green) try to organize a Life Day party, Rey (Helen Sadler) time-travels with the help of a magic whatsit, trying to figure out how she can be a better Jedi teacher to frustrated pupil Finn (Omar Miller). Rey’s story is understandably the more prominent subplot since her magic Jedi doodad (don’t ask, it doesn’t really matter) allows her to revisit various other “Star Wars” movies, including a couple of scenes from the prequels, especially “The Phantom Menace” and “Revenge of the Sith,” and the original trilogy.
Rey is inevitably made to fight Darth Vader (Matt Sloan) for control of the whatsit, at the behest of a wacky-zany version of Emperor Palpatine (Trevor Devall) and a star-struck Kylo Ren (Matthew Wood), who wants nothing but to impress his bad guy idols. Makes sense, since “The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special” is the sketch comedy equivalent of a clip show, one where references to iconic moments and goofy incidental details are objects unto themselves. This sort of crazy-quilt comfort food only really works when your voice actors are as engaged as your joke writers are funny (ex: “The Lego Batman Movie,” or the best “Star Wars”-themed “Robot Chicken” sketches). Unfortunately, the makers of “The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special” are rarely as inspired as their most unexpected callbacks, including cameos by Admiral Ackbar, Jar Jar Binks, and yes, even Maclunkey.
Beyond that: the most satisfying moments in “The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special” are predictably the scenes where sequel characters point out how silly everything looks in retrospect. Emo Kylo Ren is an easy target, and is not surprisingly the star of a few superior gags, like a drawn-out, but generally funny routine about his much-memed “The Last Jedi” topless scene. There’s also a funny gag about the death of Snoke, but it also inadvertently brings to mind how much of “The Lego Star Wars Holiday Special” is about the inevitably cyclical nature of the “Star Wars” movies. If you’ve seen these moments played straight before, they’re probably not going to be as funny when they’re presented as comedic punchlines. Some of these self-referential gags are amusing, but none are that special.
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