Cast: Dolph Lundgren, Frank Langella, Chelsea Field,Jon Cypher,Courtney Cox, Robert Duncan McNeill, Billy Barty, James Tolkan, Meg Foster, Christina Pickles
Directed by Gary Goddard
He-man (Lundgren) and his sidekicks (Field and Cypher) travel to earth to get their hands on a key that will set their sorceress (Pickles) free from the clutches of the evil Skeletor (Langella) who wants to rule the planet, also two teenagers (Cox and McNeill) get involved in what is one of the most uninspired movies ever made. Masters Of The Universe is a lifeless film all around, the type of film made with the littlest of effort because it was solely based on a TV series for kids. Indeed Masters Of The Universe is a prime example of a film being made with indifference for the film doesn’t even have the budget to have He-man fight on his own planet. This is a pretty lame movie but there are a few redeeming factors, one being Langella, Tolkan and Barty’s enthusiastic performances and to be fair the sets in the beginning and ending are well done, but one of the most disappointing parts of the film is how little action it has, as Lundgren and his sidekicks are kept out of action for a surprisingly long time. Also such a good cast is wasted on such boring material. Dolph meanwhile has some screen presence but this role doesn’t require anything but him flexing his muscles and given the lack of action, this will no doubt disappoint D.L fans. All in all though, Masters is just an extremely tedious film and completely void of energy.
My friends and I always got a kick out of this for the Lundgren factor, but yeah, both as a movie and an adaptation of the cartoon, etc., this was as bad as it gets, and probably did as much as anything to prevent Lundgren from having a mainstream movie career post Rocky IV.
ReplyDeleteThe thing about He-Man, was the cartoons were simply 30-minute advertisements for the action figures, so I think to make a movie, they wanted to do something different, but instead they made something worse. You could call in indifference, but I may call it arrogance that they looked at what H-Man was and thought "it'll be cake to do something better than that."
I think what really sunk it was He-man coming to earth, indeed had He-Man stayed on his planet, it would've been better. I also think the actors were let down by the lame material. Even though many of the actors had ethusiasm
ReplyDeletefor the part (Barty,Langella, Foster and even Dolph) The film just didn't have the budget or energy to succeed.
And I think that lack of energy came from scriptwriters, etc., that just mailed it in because they didn't take the material seriously enough to even try.
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