‘Masters of the Universe’ Is He-Mansplaining at Its Worst

You can almost picture it: A group of Mattel C-suite executives sitting around a conference table, watching a V.P. gesture toward charts and graphs depicting profit margins around Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s improbable 2023 masterpiece about socially imposed ideals, self-empowerment, and dolls. He mentions that the key to the film’s success was not just due to the tiny blond being a recognizable property thanks to decades of prime toy-store real estate. Rather, it was how that subversive megahit managed to both question and celebrate the legacy behind the I.P., walking a fine gossamer line between a wink and a soft-hearted tear.

In the back, a junior exec rises from his seat. That movie certainly tapped into the feelings of young women around the playthings of their youth and gave them a safe, irony-filled space with which to indulge in nostalgia, he notes. But: what if we could do the same thing for, like, Gen-X dudes?! The roar of approval could likely be heard from several offices down the hall.

You can feel the aura of fourth-quarter financial Power Point presentations hovering around Masters of the Universe, Mattel’s attempt to make multiplex lightning strike twice. And you can definitely clock the attempt at balancing sincerity and snarkiness behind the line of action figures that gave us a blond barbarian, a skull-faced villain, and a gloriously cheesy animated series beloved by Reagan-era kids. Director Travis Knight was one of those tykes, and has admitted he once made his own MOTU movie with his dad’s video camera during his formative years. That accounts for the slightly musty sentimentality around these characters, the same sensation one gets when you come across a box of old toys in the attic. Still, all of the bathos in the world can’t keep this would-be blockbuster from being a prime example of le cinéma du bottom line. This is not a movie. This is brand management.

Oh, you’ll get the full “By the Power of Grayskull!” treatment. But first, some housekeeping and a good deal of backstory. Come to Eternia, the mythical home of flying dragon-like creatures, and swords, and sorcery, and spaceships — really, all the stuff a 12-year-old science fiction fanatic loves. Young Prince Adam (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt) doesn’t want to be a warrior, really. He’d rather draw pictures, alone in his room. But regal duty calls. Like the rest of the young men and women growing up around Castle Grayskull, so named because it’s both gray and resembles a skull, he’s got to attend fight training with Duncan (Idris Elba), the head of the royal guard. The king (James Purefoy) thinks nothing of humiliating his son in front of his plebeian peers. At least Duncan’s daughter and fellow cadet, Teela (Eire Farrell), takes pity on the hopeless tyke.

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Enter Skeletor — played by Jared Leto, or so we’re told; honestly, it could be anybody behind that CGI skull with the glowing red eyes, so you’ll have to take the credits at their word — and his quest to gain the Sword of Power, a sword which grants whoever wields it a lot of power. “Yeah, that’s what we’re going with,” sighs the narrator regarding the weapon’s moniker, one of the first big signs of how the film plans on treating the toy line’s sheer ridiculousness. It’s worth noting to fans that most of their favorite characters with unintentionally hilarious, extremely literal names are present and accounted for: Man-at-Arms, Ram-Man, Moss Man, Trap-Jaw, Tri-clops, Mechaneck. There will be Fisto jokes. So, so many Fisto jokes.

Right, sorry, Skeletor — the in-house villain makes his move. Duncan does his best to fight off the bad guys who look like they stepped straight outta the Mos Eisley cantina, but all is lost. The royal family is captured. Luckily, Adam is sent with the sword down a rainbow-colored portal and ends up on Earth. he ends up Oklahoma City. The sword ends up in parts unknown.
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Cut to the now-twentysomething Adam (The Idea of You‘s hunk Nicholas Galitzine), explaining all of this wonky mythology to a date, who writes him off as a delusional, pretty-boy doofus. He lives with a roommate who watches The Notebook and cries a lot; that’s all he does, really, other than bust Adam’s chops, so it would not surprise anyone if his character official handle was “Roomate Who Watches The Notebook and Cries a Lot.” It beats being called Ram-Man, we guess. Adam runs the H.R. department at a local company, and spends his day looking for his missing sword online, much to the dismay of his boss (former SNL MVP Sasheer Zamata). Given that viewers will be subjected to a 141-minute runtime brimming with sitcom banter, it’s nice that the filmmakers actually put in a workplace comedy where said banter temporarily makes sense.

Anyway, dude finds his sword. When Adam hoists it heavenward and yells out the signature line, he doesn’t transform into a loincloth-wearing gym rat. But the reunion of hero and weapon serves as a beacon, which attracts both a monster wreaking havoc on a highway overpass and the now-grown Teela (Camila Mendes). She rescues Adam and ferries him back to Eternia, a place he’s been pinging for and drawing from memory since he was a kid. It’s now a city in ruins. Adam will have to save his family and the imprisoned population from Skeletor, embrace his destiny as He-Man, yadda yadda yadda.

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For a generation that grew up whiling away afternoons with the original action figures, watching the popular Filmation animated series (and its spin-off, She-Ra), and thrilling — if that’s the right word — to the mondo-Velveeta 1987 Masters of the Universe movie starring Dolph Lundgren and Frank Langella, this may seem like a return to the Eden of their youth. Everyone not immediately having their Proustian-madeleine buttons pushed will simply acknowledge that the generic digital spectacle onscreen is north of chintzy yet south of impressive; that Leto is playing Skeletor as a cross between a dinner-theater Shakespearean ham and a Catskills comedian nudging you to try the fish; that Morena Baccarin is wasted playing a sorceress who occasionally turns into an eagle; that Idris Elba does what he can with a creaky redemption arc; and that having a wisecracking sidekick is one thing, but having a wisecracking romantic interest, a wisecracking bad guy, a wisecracking female villain, a handful of wisecracking supporting players and a wisecracking robot (et tu, Kristen Wiig?) is snark overkill. At least Alison Brie seems to be having fun as Evil-Lyn. As for Galitzine? He’s just Ken in a loincloth.

“Legends aren’t born,” crows the tagline. “They’re forged.” Fair enough. For the record, however, legends usually aren’t molded in plastic, mass-manufactured, consumer-group tested, and turned into products that are fashioned into cartoons that are adapted into quick-buck live-action movies that are made to sell more products, as well as breakfast cereal, backpacks, and other sweatshop-produced pieces of merch. Knight may have a personal stake in this I.P., as well as an admirable resumé — he directed the only Transformer movie that can be accused of having something resembling a soul (Bumblebee) and made the closest thing that the animation studio LAIKA has to a bona fide masterpiece (Kubo and the Two Strings). But it’s still fan-service nostalgiabait that wants you to not take it seriously while also very much taking it seriously. The sarcasm-and-saga methodology is being applied to something that’s too thin to support it. This is not the toy story you’re looking for.