My understanding is that it takes a little while, and he has to go back when his weights start to burn. But either way, it really sounds like this movie handled the mechanics incredibly inconsistently.
I see. That's what happens when you come up with ridiculous mechanics: at some point they break down, no matter how hard you may try to make it work.
I always thought that was one of Star Wars' strengths: there's a lot of crazy tech in the SW universe, but ultimately the mechanics are pretty straightforward, easy to understand, and consistent.
More importantly, they don't get in the way of—or worse, replace—the plot; unlike some SciFi movies or shows where the protagonists are facing some kind of insurmountable technological obstacle for 90% of the duration of the movie/episode, until someone blurts out something along the lines of:
"But of course! The killer nanites are interconnected using a sub-space auto-adapting peer-to-peer communication network, so I didn't think there was any way to break it down. But it turns out that these communications generate synchronous fluctuations in their power cores, so all we have to do is adjust our power generator to their frequency to make its EM field resonate with their power cores and overload them! If all goes well, they'll explode. But it's going to be very difficult, I'll have to do it manually*. This convenient gauge on my console's screen will allow you to monitor how tightly I'm adjusting the frequency, and this other convenient gauge will show how close I am to overloading their power cores. Hopefully I can do it before they kill us all, which you'll be able to tell from the vocal countdown to the final breach of hull integrity that our central computer is making."
*The faster and the less humanly doable some operation is, the more likely you are to have to do it manually.
