“Masters of the Universe” might not know who its audience is. Sure, yes, perhaps “everyone” is the goal. Modern blockbusters are usually aiming for those golden four quadrants that might justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make a movie about an old toy. But as far as beautiful, blond Mattel products go, He-Man is not and was never going to be Barbie.
It’s a character and aesthetic — bodybuilder muscles, pageboy haircuts and all — that is about as rooted in the 1980s as you can be. The toy launched in 1982, apparently an attempt to compete with Star Wars products. The animated series came the next year, and in 1987, a movie was released with Dolph Lundgren. It was a critical and box office flop, and that was around the height of its popularity.
Yes, some have reclaimed that “Masters of the Universe” as a campy cult classic, and there have been some animated series in the last few decades, but culturally speaking, He-Man seems to have stayed in that decade. It’s a relic that went the way of Saturday morning cartoons — aside from that meme set to “What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blondes, which is referenced in the new movie. But even that’s a little long in the tooth: It was made in 2005.
This “Masters of the Universe” was directed by Travis Knight, who did spin something charming off “Transformers” in “Bumblebee.” But this is a film that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. It’s, paradoxically, a big-budget B-movie. It’s cartoony and campy, which it is also constantly apologizing for. It’s also violent enough to probably rule out the under-10 crowd. It’s aiming for something in the vein of a Taika Waititi “Thor” or a “Guardians of the Galaxy,” but it doesn’t fully commit to the thing that the HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA video understood so well: He-Man is extremely silly. Not just the character. The whole thing: the look, the names, even the phrase “by the power of Greyskull, I have the power.”
The script and story, which is laboriously credited to so many people it’s probably not worth going into, attempt to turn much of this into a one-note joke. Here, they excuse cringey names like Fisto and Ram Man as the product of a young boy’s imagination. The film sets up a world where Prince Adam (played as a boy by Artie Wilkinson-Hunt) is sent away from Eternia for his protection as the kingdom fell to Skeletor (Jared Leto). And for 15 years he’s been stranded on Earth, working a dull job in human resources, living with a roommate and obsessively looking for the Power Sword that is his only hope of getting back home. He’s also grown into a hunk ( Nicholas Galitzine ), but an extremely awkward one who isn’t shy with his origin story. Naturally, everyone thinks he’s basically crazy.
Thankfully, our time with him on Earth is short (but perhaps not short enough in a movie that runs a bloated 142 minutes, including a Lundgren cameo) and, soon enough, he’s back on Eternia and trying to help return the kingdom to its former glory. Everyone is very dismissive of him, including his old friend Teela, who has grown into a model-y warrior (played with cool girl jadedness by Camila Mendes), until he figures out how to use the sword that instantly transforms him into a superhuman. It’s difficult to stress how not exciting or dramatic this quick fix is.
The large cast is doing the best they can. Galitzine is quite awkward and sweet, but his character is deeply underdeveloped. Idris Elba brings some goofy gravitas to a fallen warrior whose confidence was shaken. As Skeletor, Leto has gone full camp with a theatrical British accent that reminded me less of Bane and more of Paul F. Tompkins’ Andrew Lloyd Webber. This isn’t a bad thing — Leto and Alison Brie, as his abused henchwoman, seem to be having the most fun of all, like exiles from an episode of “Power Rangers” — but it does make you wonder why they didn’t just cast an English character actor in the first place. Others aren’t so lucky: Morena Baccarin is mostly there for vibes as The Sorceress, and Kristen Wiig is mostly forgettable as a warrior robot.
It also tries to weave in threads about expectations of masculinity and power, but even that is messy and confused and fails to incorporate the female characters into the dialogue.
The movie might have worked better if it had just gone full Saturday morning cartoon with fewer self-deprecating jokes. But that would have required more conviction about what everyone was making in the first place.
“Masters of the Universe,” an Amazon MGM Studios release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for “sequences of violence and action, some suggestive material and language.” Running time: 142 minutes. Two stars out of four.
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