'Star Wars: The Clone Wars' review

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This was a comic book series, a video game and a TV show. Now this feature-length story finds Anakin Skywalker, his new assistant/Padawan Ahsoka Tano, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda and Captain Rex (who?) taking on evil Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) and an army of easily beatable droids while trying to save Jabba the Hutt’s son, who may be the ugliest baby on the planet.

Big question: Will this animated flick please “Star Wars” devotees and make any sense to those who don’t know their Padawan from their Dooku?

Skip it: Not only do the characters look like ventriloquist dummies acting in a computer game but the vocal performances are so rigid it sounds like they’re doing the robot while speaking. Was this film planned to be 3-D and then the producers got lazy?

Catch it: For one visually exciting scene in which the Jedi forces take on the clones by attacking vertically up a mountain. The rest of the movie? Just try not to claw at your eyes or ears.

Bottom line: Though executive producer George Lucas didn’t write the script, it’s filled with Lucas’ signature functional boredom, in which literally every line describes what someone did, plans to do or thinks someone might do. (Sample: “Looks like those bounty hunters went up there.”)  The movie’s all action and no excitement, all explanation and no coherence, which inhibits its one and only objective of introducing 6-year-olds to Jedi.

Bonus: “Clone Wars” at least provides the opportunity to vote on what is more excruciating: Knowing that Samuel L. Jackson actually lent his voice to one scene in which Mace Windu looks like his face has a metal plate in it or hearing a wise man like Obi-Wan Kenobi say things like, “That shield is certainly putting a crimp in my day!”

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