Masters of the Universe in de bioscoop met gemengde kritieken op He-Man-reboot

You need a guy who is a leading-man type, and the muscles and the strength are secondary. You can always create that, and I think Nicholas did that. He built himself up.

The film winds up feeling so much like one of those fringe festival musical theater parodies that you find yourself waiting for the characters to burst into song. Masters of the Universe touches all the fan-serving bases, with a fun cameo by a certain star of a previous film incarnation and enough post-credit sequences to guarantee several sequels. But it all comes off as terribly forced.

Masters of the Universe is so much funnier than I expected, and the fight scenes are choreographed and photographed in a way that gives the sequences just enough flair to make them stand out. While Nicholas Galitzine and Idris Elba provide the thematic structure to the film, Jared Leto's Skeletor gives a delightfully weird and cartoonish energy to every scene he's in.

Standout performance and character in Masters of the Universe: Jared Leto's Skeletor. He was the most fun happening on screen at any given time. It does feel like a few different movies crushed into one. A few different ideas of what a Masters of the Universe movie should or would be. And most importantly, it had these moments of heart and life lessons that I actually liked that didn't always land because sometimes the comedy is just there to eclipse it.

The idea of navigating your childhood hopes and fears, and incorporating those things into your adult life, is at the heart of the film. Not everyone who goes to see Masters of the Universe will have grown up with He-Man, but this film will make you wish that you did. And, at the same time, it'll make you feel grateful that he's back and quite literally, better than ever.

Amazon's head-scratching $200m-budgeted misfire fails to explain why so much time, money and effort has been wasted on a movie based on a toy that kids just don't play with any more. There's just too much distracting confusion here from Galitzine's unsure performance to the script's swirl of competing tones to the very question of why this needed to exist for it to transport us as we both hope and expect.