It's tempting to think of Star Wars' Han Solo - first played by Harrison Ford and now, in his younger incarnation, by Alden Ehrenreich - as the kind of character where a little goes a long way. As a swashbuckling smuggler in the first film, he seemed piped in from another, more grown-up film. He was Luke Skywalker's cooler older brother, the guy that got the girl because he could actually talk to girls, the slightly shady guy who wasn't quite as shady as he seemed.
By not being purely good or evil, he gave the Star Wars universe depth; by being charming and flawed he gave Star Wars a sense of fun. So it only seems logical to give him his own movie - and when it turns out, as it does in Solo, that an entire movie based around Han Solo isn't quite as much fun as it seems like it should be, it's just as logical to think that maybe he's a character best consumed in small doses.
Thing is, there's already loads of stories built around Han Solo-esque characters that work perfectly fine. Science fiction is full of charming rogues on the wrong side of the (space) law; the early work of comic book writer-artist Howard Chaykin (who drew the comic-book adaptation of Star Wars) and Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat series come to (my) mind. And that's just in science-fiction. When you're looking at a character whose roots go at least as deep as Rick from Casablanca, there's really no excuse for not hitting it out of the park.
Pointing out that Han Solo was deeply unoriginal a character is no slight on him; the whole point of the original Star Wars was that none of the elements George Lucas mixed together were original. It was how he combined them that made them work, putting old favourites up against each other in ways that made them seem fresh - and in this new setting Han Solo, a character that almost could have been one of the Three Musketeers, seemed freshest of all.
The trouble with Solo isn't that Han Solo can't carry an entire movie; it's that Han Solo can't carry an entire Star Wars movie. Han Solo works fine in a universe run by bad guys, so long as there's no real alternative. There he can either be a decent guy getting along the best he can, or he's a one-man rebellion robbing the bad guys because that's the best way he can make them hurt. The first Guardians of the Galaxy movie is a great example of this: in a galaxy with no rules, the man who makes his own rules looks pretty good.
But once there's actual good guys standing up to evil, then you get Star Wars.
Star Wars is about good versus evil, big clashes of giant forces and the little people in between who step up to bigger roles. There's only one story for Han Solo in that kind of universe: the one where he decides which side he's on. They already told that story in the first Star Wars, and then they tell it all over again here. That's not a spoiler: what else could they do? It's already been established that the rebellion began pretty much as soon as the Empire took over, and once there's a rebellion then a guy like Han looks pretty shabby if he doesn't sign up - or at least lean heavily towards them - by the end of the movie.
There's a lot to like and enjoy in Solo - strong performances, some decent action sequences, a lighter tone than we've come to expect from recent Star Wars - but it can't overcome this fundamental flaw no matter how many times Han shoots first. It ends on a note that suggests there's more sequels to come, but the core story is already over; there's only so many times Han Solo can start out selfish then end up doing the right thing before he starts to seem pathetic, and a few reviewers were already saying that when his future self turned up in The Force Awakens doing the same old smuggling trick.
Of course, there's plenty of scope for a great movie about a man who keeps falling back into the same patterns in life, someone who sees himself as a rebel but can't help but conform when the pressure's on. It's just not a movie Disney is going to make about lovable space rogue Han Solo.
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