Masters of the Universe — He-Man Is Back, and Jared Leto Is Having the Time of His Life

 

He-Man has been away from movie screens for forty years. Masters of the Universe, which opens in theaters today, brings him back — and the most interesting thing about the film is not the hero. It's the villain.

Jared Leto plays Skeletor with a commitment that is genuinely unexpected. The character is absurd by design — a skull-faced sorcerer in a purple hood who wants to conquer a planet called Eternia — and Leto does not try to ground him or make him real. He leans into the absurdity completely, and the result is the one element of this 141-minute film that never loses its energy. Every time Skeletor is on screen, the movie comes alive.

The rest of it is more complicated.

What Works

Nicholas Galitzine plays Prince Adam and his alter ego He-Man with an easy charm that suits the material. The character is essentially a sweet, slightly confused young man who keeps discovering that he is more capable than he thought — and Galitzine plays the confusion with enough self-awareness that it reads as likable rather than dim. He has good chemistry with Camila Mendes as Teela, and Idris Elba brings exactly the gravitas you would expect as Man-At-Arms, the mentor figure holding the story together.

Alison Brie as Evil-Lyn is the other standout performance. She plays the character with a dry, sidelong quality that suggests someone who knows she is in a movie and has made her peace with it. In a film that is straining very hard to be fun, Brie simply is fun, without appearing to work at it.

Director Travis Knight, whose Bumblebee remains one of the better toy-franchise films of recent years, brings real visual craftsmanship to the action sequences. The fight choreography is clean and legible, and there are moments in the third act — particularly a confrontation at Castle Grayskull — that deliver the spectacle the property has always promised.

What Doesn't

The film runs 141 minutes, and it does not earn that runtime. The world of Eternia is teased in a visually rich prologue and then largely abandoned in favor of an underground base, a forest, and a villain's lair. For a fantasy epic set on a planet with this much potential, the story feels oddly confined.

The bigger problem is structural. Masters of the Universe has clearly been designed to be the next Barbie — a self-aware, meta-comedic take on a toy property that says something about the culture that produced it. The film gestures at ideas about masculinity and strength, and then doesn't develop them. It raises the question of whether brute physical power is really what makes a hero and then answers it by having He-Man flex very impressively. The irony, if it was intended, gets lost.

At a reported budget of $200 million against a projected opening weekend of $25–30 million, the math is going to be a difficult conversation for Amazon MGM.

The Honest Verdict

Masters of the Universe is not a bad film. It is an uneven one — a movie with genuinely good performances and real moments of joy buried inside a structure that cannot quite support its own ambitions. Jared Leto's Skeletor alone is worth the price of admission for anyone who has ever loved the character, and the film is never boring in the way that bad blockbusters are boring.

But it does not become what it is clearly trying to be. The version of this movie that works — the one that earns its Barbie comparison — is visible in the margins, in Brie's performance and Leto's choices and a handful of scenes that understand exactly what they are doing. That film would have been something.

This one is pretty good, and occasionally something more.