Your Favorite Han Solo Is Joining the New ‘Miami Vice’ Movie

I know! I’m sorry! Harrison Ford is not going to get all (presumably) shirtless and sexy with Austin Butler and Michael B. Jordan. But I didn’t really try to hide it! The man in the photo is clearly none of the three people I’ve mentioned so far. Regardless, there will be a host of people who click on this just to scroll down to the bottom and yell at me, passing this completely, and I get it! But let’s get down to what this is really all about. Solo wasn’t terrible.

That’s why you’re here, right? There will certainly be those who are just excited about a new Miami Vice movie, since the 2006 Michael Mann film has turned into a cult classic. They’ll click on this just because they’re happy that there is some kind of development for the new film, which boasts an incredibly charming leading duo, but there will still be a large portion of people who pick this article just to let me know that they, in fact, did not like Solo: A Star Wars Story.

And hey, that’s their right! I’ve basically hijacked a different story to talk about why I like it; why shouldn’t they be allowed to do the same? And I won’t pretend that the movie is perfect, but I saw it twice in theaters (I had a lot more free time then) and had a blast both times. While the movie has its flaws, I think a big part of what saves it is its stellar cast. And right at the head of that cast was future Tony Award-winning actor Alden Ehrenreich.

The man was given an impossible task, though it was one that I wish Disney kept trying. Treat the characters like Hamlet, and let people bring their own interpretations. Instead, we’ve been given a weird uncanny valley that makes Weird Al’s jokes about “long-term contracts” in Yoda seem quaint by comparison. Mark Hamill will be Luke Skywalker long after his death, and as grim as that sounds, I won’t pretend like I didn’t pump my fist when he showed up in The Mandalorian (only to put that fist down once I saw his face).

But what Ehrenreich did was admirable, to say the least. He tried to bring a kind of naive gravitas to a Han Solo who wasn’t the smuggler we’d come to meet on Mos Eisley. Is that what people wanted from Han Solo? Clearly not! But it’s a swing. It’s a choice. It’s a take. It’s not just the same thing we got before, much in the same way that the 2006 Miami Vice wasn’t the same as the TV show that preceded it (despite being created by the same person).

Now, according to Deadline, Ehrenreich was beating offers away with a stick, settling on Miami Vice ‘85 for a chance to work with its two leads. The man is the bell of the ball, and he deserves it, regardless of whether his entry into the Star Wars universe revealed that the Millennium Falcon has a droid’s consciousness trapped inside of it (still, um, can’t really shake that one).