‘Masters of the Universe’ Review: Anything But a Masterful Reboot

I was a He-Man kid.

I had a bin full of action figures. I got Castle Grayskull for one birthday, and Snake Mountain the next. I cherished those toys, in part because I watched an animated show called He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, a series that existed because ’80s deregulation paved the way for toy companies to promote their wares directly to children via TV shows. Instead of making commercials that aired between the cartoons, the cartoons themselves became the commercials.

So it felt right that there was a new Skeletor action figure waiting for me on my seat at the New York premiere of the first Masters of the Universe movie in 39 years. Ditto for the speech before the movie from a Mattel executive, who proudly declared that his famous toy company is now in the business of “brand management.” I’m not sure how much brand He-Man has left to manage at this point beyond its value to Olds™ like me who were brainwashed into loving its goofy heroes and villains like Buzz-Off and Sy-Klone and especially Stinkor, a toy that looked like a skunk man and, true to his name, smelled like crap.

That’s why this Masters of the Universe movie exists: To restore this franchise to a place of prominence and marketability for generations to come. Based on the early word of mouth I’ve heard, it may just succeed. But “successful” is not a word I would personally use to describe Masters of the Universe, at least not creatively. This gargantuan 140-minute film — the length of almost seven full episodes of the cartoon series! — conjures a very faithful live-action recreation of that old ’80s world of barbarians, wizards, and robots, then proceeds to relentlessly mock.

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The characters are introduced in a lengthy prologue narrated by Prince Adam (Nicholas Galitzine) establishing the fantasy realm of Eternia. That’s the home of heroic warriors like Mekaneck (James Wikinson), who can giraffe himself at will, and evil warriors like Spikor (James Apps) who is extremely pointy. As a boy, the warm-hearted Adam was taught by Man-At-Arms (Idris Elba) that the world is a cruel and dangerous place where only the strong survive.

Wouldn’t you know it? About three minutes later the evil sorcerer Skeletor (Jared Leto) invades Eternia, seeking the Sword of Power housed in Castle Grayskull. The castle’s own Sorceress (Morena Baccarin) sends Adam to Earth, where he spends the next 15 years in exile — somehow rising to the status of a human resources manager at a nameless corporation despite constantly telling anyone who will listen that he is actually a royal prince from a faraway galaxy who must locate a sword in order to return home and defeat a big blue man with a skeleton for a face.

Adam finally finds the sword in — where else? — a comic book store filled with vintage Mattel products, and soon his childhood friend Teela (Camila Mendes) is back fighting by his side. She brings Adam home to Eternia for a reunion with Man-At-Arms and the rest of the surviving heroes, and the quest to stop Skeletor finally gets underway.

Director Travis Knight (Bumblebee) fills the comic store where the Sword of Power is hidden with tired nerd stereotypes, and uses the scene to poke fun at immature adults hung up on their childhood obsessions. But Adam himself is an immature adult hung up on his childhood obsession — the walls of his bedroom in the apartment he shares with a snarky roommate (Christian Vunipola) are covered in drawings of wizards and swords. It just so happens that instead of playing with He-Man toys as a kid, Adam actually was He-Man.

That sense of confusion about whether this movie is meant to celebrate a nostalgic IP or scoff at it for being incredibly childish permeates the entire film. Back in Eternia, Adam reunites with classic Masters of the Universe characters like Ram-Man (Jon Xue Zhang) and Fisto (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson). That leads to an exhausting running gag that threads through the rest of the film: A Masters character will appear, Adam will explain what he used to call them when he was 10, while they recoil in horror at their juvenile name. Fisto, for example, wants to make it very clear that despite Adam’s nickname for him, he does not fist people. (Parents, get ready to explain to your kids why the grown-ups are chuckling at that one! Ho ho!)

If these characters’ names are so silly, why not change them? Or use different characters? Costume designer Richard Sale did a truly impressive job translating the old Masters toys and cartoons into three-dimension beings, mostly so they could serve as punching bags for saggy ironic quips about how every Masters toy sounds like it was named by a child.

The movie’s message is equally muddled. Knight decided to make his He-Man a referendum on modern masculinity. Raised by a king who wanted him to be strong, Adam’s quest to reclaim the Sword of Power is partly a quest to become the (he-)man his father always wanted him to be. But Masters of the Universe also insists on multiple occasions that might does not make right. To that end, it includes moments where Adam — using his background in human resources — tries to bring Earthly ideas about conflict resolution and negotiation to his struggle with Skeletor. He insists he wants to talk to his enemies rather than punch them, something the Sorceress herself praises when she claims in one scene that Adam’s true power is not brute strength, but rather understanding and empathy.

Alas, any time Adam tries to solve problems with communication it backfires. Every attempt to defuse a fight leads to an even bigger battle. And the film finds no nuances whatsoever in Skeletor, who Leto plays as a power-hungry dictator with a skull for a head and an inexplicable English accent. So I guess the lesson here is that you should say you don’t want to fight, because that makes you look a nice person, and then punch whoever opposes you anyway? For a guy whose super power is supposedly his boundless kindness, Adam sure kills a bunch of people in this movie.

Galitzine is very game to look a goofball; give him credit for his superhuman willingness to bumble around like the world’s most ineffectual action hero in little more than a loincloth. But his transformation from inept Adam to hulking He-Man would be more convincing if he didn’t look like a bodybuilder from the moment he appeared onscreen. Trying to insist that this guy is a lonely dork who’s never seen the inside of a gym is a bit like putting glasses on Rachael Leigh Cook in She’s All That and claiming she’s ugly.

Leto makes a decent Skeletor, although with his generic British bad guy accent, I would not have known it was him beneath the various layers of effects without the end credits. (Ditto for Kristen Wiig, who apparently voiced a CGI robot character.) Idris Elba gets just enough to do as Man-At-Arms to make you wish he’d gotten more opportunities throughout his career as the lead in big-budget spectacles, rather than the wise and strong advisor to the hero. (See also: the Thor franchise.) The best performance in this Masters of the Universe is probably Alison Brie, who understands the film’s self-satirizing tone, and sells her compliment of winking jokes about her cruel skeleton man of a boss.

The creators of this Masters of the Universe felt so confident that the world needed a glossy new version of this material that they committed to a large-scale, big-budget version of it that runs nearly two and a half hours. But they also felt so insecure about their source material that their adaptation constantly ridicules almost every component of itself, right down to the name of the main character.

So why did they make it at all? I know, I know, to sell more toys, duh. Still, this exercise of attempting to reenergize an old IP by taking the piss out of it feels a little misguided. In a world where original concepts like Obsession and Backrooms are suddenly the hottest films in Hollywood, an expensive spoof of Masters of the Universe already looks nearly as dated as the old He-Man cartoon I watched as a kid.

RATING: 4/10

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