This efficient box-ticking is admirable, to a degree. When George Lucas made his three Star Wars prequels, from 1999 to 2005, he managed to garble the continuity so badly that they contradicted the events of the original trilogy. But Solo, written by the father and son team of Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan, does a neat job of filling in the gaps in its hero’s back story, and devotees will appreciate every line of dialogue that echoes something they’ve already heard a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

They might wish, though, that it had grander ambitions. Perhaps it would have been different if Phil Lord and Christopher Miller had directed Solo, as they were initially hired to do. But, during production, the guys who made The Lego Movie were fired and replaced by the guy who made The Da Vinci Code – and Ron Howard, for all his merits, is not known for his radical film-making. What he has delivered is a Disney-fied, sub-Guardians of the Galaxy adventure: a lightly comic, family-friendly, action-packed, nigglingly sexist popcorn movie which isn’t the worst Star Wars film, but which is the most inessential.

It’s also episodic. To be generous, you could say that the choppy structure is true to the roots of Star Wars as an homage to such cliff-hanging Saturday matinees as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. But instead of having an over-arching plot, Solo has a string of tenuously connected, protracted action set pieces, none of which is too coherent, and most of which are obscured by smoke and steam.

In between these shoot-em-ups, Han makes a dash from his grey, industrialised home planet, enlists in and then deserts from the Empire’s army, joins a band of robbers, and makes an impressive number of new friends; considering that the film is entitled Solo, it’s remarkable how little time its protagonist spends alone. Although it starts as the lovers-on-the-run tale of Han and his childhood sweetheart Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke), it soon makes room for Chewie, Lando, a pistol-twirling mercenary named Beckett (Woody Harrelson), his girlfriend Val (Thandie Newton), a four-armed alien called Rio (voiced by Jon Favreau), and the robotic L3-37 (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who demands equal rights for her mechanical sisters and brothers. What this line-up lacks is a proper villain, but the entertainingly smarmy gangster who employs the crew to carry out a ‘hyper-fuel’ heist is named Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany).