Here’s a primo opportunity for fandorks to pretend to enjoy a movie and therefore justify their decades of franchise devotion: Masters of the Universe (now on Prime Video), the nigh-endlessly-in-the-works movie adaptation of the 1980s IP that, as The Toys That Made Us so eloquently detailed, began as a toy line, expanded into a TV series that was a thinly veiled syndicated after-school commercial for said toys, and made billions for Mattel. Oh, it also became a widely reviled 1987 movie starring Dolph Lundgren as the hero He-Man, who’s pretty much a wussier version of Conan the Barbarian. The considerable creative and commercial failure of said film — a notoriously cheap peesacrap from Golan-Globus, who were masters of the universe of notoriously cheap peesesacrap — meant Hollywood just HAD to take another swing with this franchise, prompting eons of false starts and treks through Development Hell.
That is, until Amazon-MGM finally got their crap together and put Bumblebee director Travis Knight in charge of stars Nicholas Galitzine, Camila Mendes, and Idris Elba, a reasonably talented group that churned out, well, another peesacrap that reportedly cost $200 million to make, and earned a relatively meager $114 million at the box office, insert sad butt-trombone noise here. Why did this happen? Maybe diehard MOTU fans aren’t as plentiful as it seems. Maybe the world has changed, evident by the rejection of aging IP like this and Mortal Kombat, and the embrace of stuff like Backrooms and Obsession; maybe it’s because word got out that it’s simply a stupid-ass movie.
The Gist: We open with voiceover by Adam Glenn (Galitzine), the man who would be He-Man if he’d just shut up and get to the halfway point of the movie. Yes, that’s correct — we don’t see He-Man for more than an hour. You’ve been warned! Anyway, Adam’s blahblahblah immediately sets the movie’s irreverent tone when he says, “I swear I’m not high.” He once was the prince of Eternia, a far-off world of magic and dragons and super-powered heroes and weirdo villains who are musclemen with skeleton heads, e.g., Skeletor (Jared Leto, whose face we never see and whose voice is a fairly entertaining and nutty affectation of sniveling, sneering bad-guy cliches). Said physiological curiosity attacks and takes control of Eternia, enslaving Adam’s parents, the king and queen. The brouhaha finds young Adam zworped through an ugly special effect to Earth, where, 15 years later, he’s a cubicle drone in Oklahoma City, earnestly and naively telling his date that he’s actually from another dimension or planet or whatever, and needs to find the magic sword he lost during the zworping so he can go back home and save the world. Perhaps it goes without saying that it’s a bad date for the lovely woman he subjects to his full-on clueless doofusness.
After nearly getting fired for searching for swords on the internet during company time, Adam actually finds the damn thing attached to a statue display in a comic book shop. Now, it’s worth noting that Adam is a very physically attractive and fit moron who looks alpha but acts beta-minus, evident by how he eventually tries to engage colorful maniac villains like Trap Jaw (Sam C. Wilson), Beast Man (Gary Martin), and Evil-Lyn (Alison Brie) in dialogue to deescalate conflict. Of course, it doesn’t work because in movies like this violence is inevitable. Anyway, eventually is the key word here, because there’s so much screwing around and dragging-of-feet going on, even after Adam’s old pal Teela (Mendes) arrives on Earth to bring him back to the Skeletor-enslaved Eternia. I mean, we get dithering bits with Adam’s secret rom-com enthusiast of a roommate, jokey The Cure needle drops and winky-nudgy bullroar like a Dolph Lundgren cameo set at the local weightliftery. Yes, this movie is a rather trying 143 f—ing minutes. Feel free to count every last one of them.
Once back in his home world, Adam and Teela find his former mentor/her father Man-At-Arms — a mortifying role for Idris Elba in the sense that he has to wear a ridiculous helmet, trip and fall down a lot and generally regress into a cartoon character — and an annoying robot ally (Kristen Wiig), and face off against the bad guys. And finally finally finally Adam raises his Sword of Power and becomes He-Man so he can throw around some papier-mache boulders and learn that Adam really isn’t the milquest toast on the tea cart. The crew frees former allies, among them Fisto (Johannes Haukur Johannesson) and Ram-Man (Jon Xue Zhang), thus opening the door for the following one-liners: “I fist people!” and “Give ’em head, Ram-Man.” Jesus H. Jimbo, why does everything have to be so damn exhausting?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Sure, MOTU has parallels to Barbie and Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and cops some moves from Guardians of the Galaxy and The Lord of the Rings. But once that Queen song kicks in, the bell rang loud and clear: This essentially updates the 1980 cheeseball unclassic Flash Gordon, which holds up like toothpick Jenga in a Filipino typhoon.
Performance Worth Watching: Considering Leto’s failure to draw people to Tron: Ares, it probably was worth about $30 million in MOTU ticket sales that we never see his face and only get to hear a heavily distorted iteration of his voice, a performance that’s intermittently amusing.
Sex And Skin: None — just a bunch of lame innuendo and double-entendres.
Our Take: Are we all proud of ourselves now? We’ve got this done and over with and it’s time to move the heck on. Sure, this MOTU drops the ball by not giving us appearances by the immortal Mer-Man or the equally immortal Leechor, Evil Master of Power Suction — there’s always the sequel, hahahahaha — in spite of its patience-testing run time and intense commitment to inanity. I guess it’s visually and conceptually overstuffed enough already, and “enough already” is our prevailing response to this amalgamation of dumb characters, glossy/empty Marvel-ized CG action, and self-loathing disguised as cheeky self-awareness.
See, this slab of IP knows it’s very silly and cynical of origin, and understands that nobody of sound mind takes it seriously, and therefore believes that leaning into its more embarrassing elements will be endearing. And I’m sorry to report that it’s anything but. Perhaps the core question is whether a winning approach to the cheeseball exploits of He-Man and Skeletor is even possible in the first place. You can’t take it seriously, and not taking it seriously in this case renders the final product next-level annoying. It quickly becomes clear that the makers of MOTU aren’t aware that the ribs are a sensitive area of the body, and nudging them until they’re bruised purple is a rather unpleasant experience for the recipient.
The screenplay is the product of four screenwriters and two additional story contributors who seemingly just added shit with every pass and never considered editing out any dross that might slow things down. It’s structured as skirmish skirmish skirmish interspersed with who-cares plot/character development and irritating unjokes and one-liners that are repeated about six times each. Visually, the film boasts a plasticky sheen that’s conceptually appropriate but unmemorable, generic CG-enhanced junk rendered anonymous among all the Transformers and Marvel and Jurassic franchises. The glossy-but-grating score sounds like de-holiday-ized Trans-Siberian Orchestra, bolstered by needle drops that bloody our noses, e.g., Snap!’s “I’ve Got the Power” and 4 Non-Blondes’ “What’s Up.” It makes fun of goofy hero names and has the gall to stage a kerfuffle that involves crashing into an open-bed truck filled with crates of fresh fruit. Is this how fruit is transported in 2026? In crates stacked on an open-bed truck? More to the point, is Masters of the Universe how we want to be entertained in 2026? I think not.
Our Call: This Masters is a classic case of a very busy movie that feels like nothing of interest happens. I wasn’t feeling any of it. Or perhaps more accurately, not having any of it. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
