Masters of the Universe

It's a He-Man movie, right? And I was at the exact target age of the original, animated TV series that existed primarily to sell action figures. I don't remember whether I or my brother ever had any of the action figures. It was the kind of thing a pastor's family never had money for. But it didn't cost us anything to watch the TV show (rabbit-ears TV and whatnot). It was the kind of mindless fun that went down easily between getting home from school and dinnertime, or maybe it was Saturday mornings. I don't recall. But we dug it, and we also enjoyed the 1980s cult film featuring Dolph Lundgren as He-Man and the great Frank Langella as Skeletor. The whole family had a ball with that. Langella's makeup reminded my dad of someone powerful (at the time) but not particularly nice, and the nickname "Skeletor" became our little family joke whenever that person came up in conversation. Money can't buy that kind of fun, which is a good thing because we didn't have any.

But enough about the 1980s. Well, almost enough. Did you know that the earth teens who served as point-of-view characters in the 1987 movie were played by Courteney Cox, a.k.a. Monica on Friends, and Robert Duncan McNeill, a.k.a. Tom Paris on Star Trek: Voyager? Could anyone be a better Evil-Lyn than Meg Foster, she of the almost see-through blue eyes? Or did you know Man-At-Arms was played by the police chief from Hill Street Blues and the Sorceress by the head nurse from St. Elsewhere? Or how about the principal from Back to the Future playing a detective? Voyager's Maje Culluh played the one-eyed villain Blade, and the movie also featured widely credited "little person" actor Billy Barty and My Three Sons alum Barry Livingston. The movie was crazy with people you'd remember from back in the day, and you don't even remember it, do you? Well, do you?

So the 2026 reboot was meant to be another terrible franchise movie, and I'm afraid the box office will probably suffer from that perception. But the movie isn't terrible at all, and the people spreading the rumor that it sucks, sight unseen, are the ones who suck. There, I've said it.

It's a really fun movie that doesn't take itself one whit more seriously than it ought to. It allows its hero to be heroic without going overboard with "He-Man" machismo. And let's be honest, Nicholas Galitzine looks great in that loincloth. Joining him in the cast are Camila Mendes (Riverdale) as Teela, not so much a girl-boss as a tough cookie who gives young Adam (as He-Man is known at home) just the push he needs to become the hero Eternia needs. Idris Elba plays her dad, Duncan a.k.a. Man-At-Arms. A mercifully unrecognizable Jared Leto plays Skeletor, and choose whichever of those two modifiers you like, it applies because he doesn't suck, for once. Yes, children, even Jared Leto being in it doesn't ruin this movie. Although at times I had a hard time understanding his lines (about 20% of what he said flew by me, uncomprehended). I guess it's tough to read lips when the person talking at you has a skull for a face. Also featured are James Purefoy (Rome, The Following) as Adam's hard-driving royal father, Morena Baccarin (Firefly) as the Sorceress, and the previous He-Man, Dolph Lundgren, in an important cameo. Also, Kristin Wiig provides the voice of a lovable battle robot.

While it runs a little long, I didn't have a problem with this film's pace. It establishes how Adam ends up on earth, trying to fit into a corporate life that stifles his identity as the lost prince of Eternia, and what it costs him to keep looking for the Sword of Power that went missing when he escaped from Skeletor's clutches as a child. The action goes into near-nonstop gear after he finds the sword in (of all places) a comic book store, and an other-worldly beast comes hunting for him. Of course Teela whisks him back to Eternia and the race is on to save his world from the post-apocalyptic horror Skeletor has been imposing on it. The adventure has bizarre and sometimes just slightly ridiculous heroes and villains, wacky battles that skew haphazardly all over the boundary between sword-and-sorcery fantasy and high-tech spacecraft-and-aircraft science fiction. It has a talking tiger. It has tons of cyborgs with such enhancements as extendable necks and iron fists. It has a magical maguffin that turns out not to be where the magic is really at. And in addition to some knockout battle scenes, it has laughs and high spirits and an undeniable dose of sex appeal.

Lo, the Three Scenes That Made It For Me: (1) Adam almost kisses Teela, but she friend-zones him just in time. Awkward, but sexy and funny at the same time. (2) Adam's "I think I just died" scene, and what he learns from it. (3) The wild aerial chase through the Eternian forest after Teela, Duncan and Adam escape from Skeletor's dungeon. The joy you see on Adam's face during scenes like this (another example is how he laughs as Teela's ship enters hyperspace, earlier in the movie) kind of makes the movie. This isn't a "Don't look for a smile here, I'm too busy to have fun" hero like, for instance, Black Panther, with all due respect to the memory of Chadwick Boseman. This is light entertainment and it doesn't forget it. Honorary Mention: Adam's coaching by the soul-crushing chief of the human resources office where he works, until he doesn't. It would be so much better to find a magic sword and become a generational hero in a world like Eternia, wouldn't it?