It's high camp and high-five heroics as meme colossus He-Man makes his big-screen return almost 40 years after the Dolph Lundgren, Courteney Cox, and Frank Langella-starring Masters of the Universe flopped in cinemas, only to then enjoy a second life as a cult favourite.
If you still have the toys somewhere in the attic and dodged homework in favour of the 1983-84 animated series, then get ready to be taken all the way back to a simpler time, when your only real worries were how to hustle your way to another action figure and what was for tea. In that order of importance.
For this reboot of the sword and sorcery shenanigans, we're in the company of Travis Knight, director of stop-motion treat The Boxtrolls and the charming Transformers spin-off Bumblebee, and a filmmaker ideally suited to mix action, humour, and heart. What they're aiming for is the sweet spot that the recent Dungeons & Dragons reboot, the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, and 1980s Flash Gordon call home, and while Masters of the Universe doesn't ultimately get there, you can have fun along the way. Better IPs have resulted in worse films.
Handsome Devil star Nicholas Galitzine winningly plays Adam/He-Man, an Earth-dwelling misfit who was once royalty on his home planet of Eternia. Exiled as a child in a bid to keep him safe from the evil Skeletor (a scenery-chomping Jared Leto), Adam now works in HR but spends his days - and dates - banging on about Eternia and how he needs to find a way back. It appears all hope is lost until one day his phone pings...
With a ridiculous running time of 140 minutes, Knight goes all out to give viewers their money's worth, but Masters of the Universe's amalgam of fights, fantasy, in-jokes, and retro nods is too stop-start, never achieving that freewheeling form of the classics - six different writers between story and screenplay is reflected on screen. From a Lundgren cameo to Queen's Brian May on the soundtrack and the use of the Snap! banger The Power, there is plenty to like; there's also a feeling throughout that same-again action occupies too much screen time.
An end-credits-rolling sequence sets up a sequel. The $200 million budget and whatever else that needs to be clawed back in the here and now suggest the producers may have their work cut out to turn that hope into celluloid.
