Review: 'Masters of the Universe' revives the '80s toy commercial, er, TV show into an action franchise with no brains

I acknowledge that I am not the recommended audience for “Masters of the Universe,” for two important reasons: 1) I was too old to be a fan of the oversized toy commercial of an animated series that ran from 1983 to 1985; and 2) I have a functioning brain in my head.

Apparently the folks at Mattel thought they could turn their intellectual property into the same type of crowd-pleasing movie that they did with “Barbie.” They did this without considering that the “Masters of the Universe” toy franchise didn’t spark children’s imaginations the way Barbie dolls did — because the cruddy TV show did all the work there. 

The series was centered on Prince Adam of Eternia, who would wield a magic sword that — with the incantation of the words “By the power of Grayskull! I HAVE THE POWER!” — would turn him into the hyper-muscular He-Man. Our hero had friends and allies, including the armored Man-at-Arms, the brave Teela and a talking green tiger named Cringer, aka Battle Cat. The villain, Skeleton, was a talking skull with a ripped body. 

The names were dumb on purpose, so children wouldn’t get confused when buying the corresponding toys. In this new movie version, that becomes a running joke, as the names were given out by young Adam when he was 10 years old.

The movie shows Prince Adam as Adam Glenn (played by Nicholas Galitzine), a hapless cubicle dweller in Oklahoma City who has vague memories and childhood drawings of his youth as a prince on Eternia. To set this up, we see a younger Adam witnessing Skeletor’s takeover of the kingdom, defeating Duncan, aka Man-at-Arms (Idris Elba), who’s trying to protect Adam’s parents, the king (James Purefoy) and queen (Charlotte Riley). Only fast thinking by The Sorceress (Morena Baccarin) gets Adam and the magic sword to safety on Earth.

It takes an attack from a monster, The Beast, to allow Adam to connect back to Eternia — when his former childhood friend, Teela (played all grown up by Camila Mendes) arrives on Earth to rescue him and return him to his home world. That world is dark and depressing, thanks to Skeletor and his chief aide, the witchy Evil-Lyn (played by Alison Brie). 

Will Adam discover his power? Will he rescue Eternia from Skeletor’s grip? Will Teela and Man-at-Arms, her inebriated father, reconcile their differences? If you can’t guess the answers to those questions, then first grade must have been rough.

The casting of Jared Leto as Skeletor is worth a moment to reflect, mostly on how horribly the Oscar-winning actor’s career has gone the last few years. The last few years, Leto’s movies have included “Tron: Ares,” “Haunted Mansion,” “Morbius” and “House of Gucci” — stinkers all. At least with “Masters of the Universe,” Leto could have denied involvement, as Skeletor’s bony mask never comes off. You have to admire Leto’s commitment to the bit, even if the performance is as much a mess as the rest of the film.

Galitzine, who was fun in “The Sheep Detectives” and the Anne Hathaway romance “The Idea of You,” is fine as the goofy and gallant Prince Adam. But the only performer who doesn’t act like they’re above this nonsense is Brie, who actually understands the assignment of playing a campy villain.

The real mystery here is who director Travis Knight (“BumbleBee”) thought he was making “Masters of the Universe” for. The tone veers from strained attempts to joke about the franchise’s dumb-as-dirt characters or earnest scenes of the hero learning his purpose. And because the movie tries to have it both ways, trying to be either self-satire or inspirational fantasy adventure, it fails to connect either way.

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‘Masters of the Universe’

★1/2

Opens Friday, June 5, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence/action, some suggestive material, and language. Running time: 140 minutes.

Review: 'Power Ballad' shows the power of Paul Rudd, in a charmer from the director of 'Once' and 'Sing Street'

It’s no surprise but still a delight that Paul Rudd can’t help but give a charming, likable performance, even when he’s playing someone who’s a bit unhinged — as he does in “Power Ballad,” the newest music-centered comedy by Irish director John Carney.

Rudd plays Rick Power, the lead singer for a Dublin wedding band, performing ‘90s pop for happy couples. We learn fairly early that he was once a rock star, who left his musical glory days behind for a settled home life with his wife, Rachel (Marcella Plunkett), and their teen daughter, Aja (Beth Fallon). 

At one wedding, it turns out the groom has invited an old friend — Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas), the last member of a now-defunct boy band who hasn’t been a solo success. Danny joins Rick’s band for a song, and the two singers strike up a friendship — which leads to an all-night jam session where they talk about songwriting and show each other what they’re working on.

Not much comes of this until months later, when Rick is in a shopping mall and hears something over the PA system. It’s a song that sounds familiar — because he wrote it. But it’s Danny who’s turned it into a hit single.

Rick tries to contact Danny, through his L.A. agent, Mac (Jack Reynor) — but because Rick can’t prove he wrote the song, he’s got no way to claim credit. He still tries, which makes him so crazy it alienates Rachel, Aja, and his bandmates. The exception is his guitarist pal, Sandy (played by Peter McDonald, who co-wrote the script with Carney). 

Carney has made a nice career out of Irish-based movies about musicians — the best being the Oscar-winning “Once” and the delightful “Sing Street.” “Power Ballad” is more broadly comedic than those movies, though not as obvious and slapstick-driven as it could have been. Carney also collaborates again, as he did on “Sing Street,” to write songs with rocker Gary Clark, and the resulting song “How to Write a Song (Without You)” is a worthy example of the movie’s title.

Ultimately, what keeps “Power Ballad” energized is Rudd, who deploys his good-natured persona and brings just a bit of edge to it. He also, it turns out, has a passable singing voice — he’s no Michael Buble, but he makes Rick’s wedding-singer moves feel authentic, which makes us like Paul Rudd even more. And I didn’t think that was possible.

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‘Power Ballad’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 5, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language throughout and some drug use. Running time: 98 minutes.

Review: 'Backrooms' is a warped suspense thriller with strong performances, visual thrills, and not enough room for explanations

The mind-bending suspense thriller “Backrooms” has a deliciously warped premise — a mystery space on the fringes of what we naively call reality — and tries to apply it to a few psychological themes, including loneliness and survivor’s guilt. 

If director Kane Parsons doesn’t quite succeed in melding all of those ideas together, give him a ton of credit for taking some big swings in this visually arresting movie.

The setting is a nondescript furniture store in an ordinary strip mall in an unremarkable American suburb, circa 1990. The owner, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), is in bad shape — recently divorced and kicked out of his house, he’s living in the store, which would only inconvenience the customers if he had any. The only people he talks to are his assistant manager, Kat (Lucite Maxwell), her video making boyfriend, Bobby (Finn Bennett), and his therapist, Dr. Mary Klein (Renate Reinsve). 

Clark is trying to figure out why the lights keep flickering in the store. When he’s exploring the basement showroom, he sees light trickling in from what appears to be a crack in the wall. Within that wall, Clark discovers a portal that goes to … well, another room like the one he was in, with the same beige walls and carpeting. And beyond that, more rooms, along with other things that defy explanation.

At least when Clark tries to explain it all to Mary, the explanations make no sense. Only when Mary, whose road to psychiatry started when dealing with her unbalanced mom (Krista Kosonen), ventures into the store does she see for herself. 

Parsons, a 21-year-old filmmaker who started experimenting with these scenarios in a series of YouTube shorts, deploys a script by Will Soodik to create fascinating scenes that dig under the mundane suburban surface to find unsettling things beneath. Seldom has an empty hallway seem so packed with menace.

In front of those beige walls, Ejiofor and Reinsve give electric performances. Ejiofor distills the American male feeling of feeling hard done that life hasn’t worked out like he thought it would. And Reinsve, the Norwegian star of “Sentimental Value,” gives one of the smartest and most nuanced versions of the horror “final girl” trope I’ve ever seen.

“Backrooms” has moments that frequently surprise, which makes it a pity that Parsons, unsurprisingly, can’t stick the landing. I won’t say much about the ending, except to say it involves a character played by Mark Duplass — and that his scene should either have been five minutes longer or cut entirely. The movie needed either less explanation or more, not the half-baked coda it delivers.

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‘Backrooms’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 29, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and some violent content/bloody images. Running time: 110 minutes.

Review: 'Pressure,' a play-turned-movie about the decision to launch D-Day, is a showcase for Andrew Scott and Brendan Fraser

The World War II drama “Pressure” feels like a movie from another era — a self-contained chamber piece where men (and one woman) in uniform talk about a weighty decision that’s rapidly approaching, the outcome of which hinges on the force of their well-acted arguments.

Director Anthony Maras (“Hotel Mumbai”) focuses in on Allied headquarters in the U.K. in June 1944. The commander of the Allied forces, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser), has a major decision ahead of him: To order some 160,000 troops to storm the beaches at Normandy by air, sea and land. They’re all ready to go on Monday, June 5.

The one uncontrollable factor in the invasion is the weather. Eisenhower’s meteorologist, Col. Irving Krick (Chris Messina), assures Ike that the skies will be calm on the 5th, just as they were on June 5, 1925, and other years on that date. But Ike has brought in another meteorologist, Group Capt. James Stagg (Andrew Scott), for a second opinion.

Stagg, a taciturn Scotsman, has no use for Krick’s charts of weather data from years past. He wants the current data, from weather balloons and observatories from Spain to Iceland. And what the data tells Stagg is that two massive storms are bearing down on England and Normandy on the 5th. Stagg’s recommendation is to wait, possibly as long as June 18th, even though that means the Germans will learn of the invasion plans in the meantime. 

Maras wrote the screenplay with David Haig, based on Haig’s play — and the script’s concentration on tense conversation shows those theatrical roots. The movie is a series of one-on-one dialogues, between Stagg and Krick, or Stagg and Ike, or Ike and his secretary and chauffeur, Kay Summersby (Kerry Condon), or Kay advising Stagg on how to talk to Eisenhower. (The play doesn’t get near the speculation of an affair between Kay and Ike, which historians have largely discounted as false.)

The performances by Fraser and Scott highlight the contrasts between their characters. Eisenhower is the man of action, seeking a definitive answer to the weather problem, to fend off doubts prompted by a disastrous invasion dress rehearsal that left many troops dead. Stagg, on the other hand, is a man of science, which means he’s learned to comfortable with the uncertainty left by incomplete data. 

The best parts of “Pressure” come when Scott and Fraser work off of each other, finding common cause within the gaps between command decisiveness and scientific ambiguity. And when the break in the weather comes, as history tells us it must, their reactions speak volumes.

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‘Pressure’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 29, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for war violence, bloody images, some strong language, and smoking. Running time: 100 minutes.

Review: 'Tuner' hits some strong notes as a romance and character study, but its heist element is a sour chord

Director Daniel Roher’s first narrative feature, “Tuner,” is part heist flick, part character study and part romantic drama — and never comfortably meshes those disparate parts.

Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman) is a piano tuner in New York City, working in rich people’s houses and music schools, making Steinways and Yamahas sound better. Harry’s getting on in years, so he’s training an apprentice, Niki White (Leo Woodall), to take over the trade. 

Niki suffers from hyperacusis, a disorder he says makes him allergic to loud noises. He wears earplugs while he’s tuning pianos, so he can focus on the notes of the strings, and he wears headphones to block out the distractions of other noise.

One evening, when he’s working on a piano in a rich family’s home, Niki hears something distracting upstairs. He goes up and finds a crew trying to cut into a safe. Niki uses his sensitive hearing to crack the safe, so he can get on with his piano work. But the guy in charge of the crew, Uri (Lior Raz), recognizes talent when he sees it — so he offers Niki a lot of money to open more safes for what Uri calls his “security” firm.

Niki agrees, because of a sudden need for money — because Harry has fallen ill, and Harry and his wife, Marla (Tovah Feldshuh), owe some $36,000 in hospital bills. 

All this happens just as Niki has met Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), a gifted pianist and composer, whose working on a composition that she hopes will land her an apprenticeship with a famous composer (Jean Reno). Niki and Ruthie begin a romance, which is the last thing a guy who’s palling around with crooks should be doing.

Roher, a documentarian who won an Oscar for “Navalny,” co-wrote the script with Robert Ramsey, a Hollywood veteran — but I’m not assigning blame for the story’s more ridiculous contrivances as it works to meld the classical music world with the criminal element. I was along for the ride, mostly, until a jaw-dropping coincidence toward the movie’s end made the movie’s plausibility snap like a twig.

Woodall, who made an impression as a young soldier in “Nuremberg,” is solid here as the accidental thief, and he and Liu (“Bottoms”) have an easygoing chemistry that makes the romantic subplot the most charming part of the movie. But there are too many elements of disbelief that one has to swallow to make “Tuner” palatable.

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‘Tuner’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 29, in theaters. Rated R for language throughout, some violence, drug use and brief nudity. Running time: 109 minutes.

Review: 'The Mandalorian and Grogu' is old-school 'Star Wars,' with strong action and a fun sense of adventure

I grew up as a “Star Wars” fan, someone who at age 12 took two buses to get to the other side of Spokane, Wash., in the summer of 1977 to attend the one theater in town playing the original movie. (In my eighth-grade journalism class that fall, I wrote a critique of it — my first movie review.)

However, I was resistant to jump into the TV series spun out of the movies. That galaxy far, far away, I’ve always thought, needed to be seen on a big screen.

Now comes “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” the first live-action release spun out from one of the franchise’s TV shows. (“Solo” and “Rogue One” were prequels of the original trilogy, and “The Clone Wars” predated the animated series that followed.) And where I may not know the ins and outs of the lore behind the characters, I didn’t find that ignorance a barrier to enjoying an old-school example of “Star Wars” action and adventure.

For folks like me who didn’t watch the show, a quick bit of background: Our hero here is Din Djarin, a former bounty hunter played by Pedro Pascal — though, with the helmet he is honor-bound to always wear, it’s hard to tell. (In the closing credits, two other actors are credited as Pascal’s body doubles.) Din has given up that mercenary-for-hire life to be father and protector to Grogu, a toddler of 53 years who’s of the same species as the old Jedi master Yoda. 

Still, Din, who’s sometimes called Mando, now works for the New Republic — this movie is set between the events of the original trilogy and “The Force Awakens” — hunting down the remnants of the Galactic Empire. The Republic commander, Col. Ward (Sigourney Weaver), sends Din out on a tricky mission: Return Rotta the Hut (voiced by Jeremy Allen White), the surviving son of Jabba the Hutt, to the two Hutts currently ruling the deceased Jabba’s crime syndicate. Once Rotta is returned, the twin Hutts will give the Republic information to capture the Empire’s biggest fugitive, Janu Coin (played by Johnny Coyne, showing how lazy “Star Wars” writers are getting in naming characters). 

Din, with Grogu on his shoulder occasionally using The Force to move stuff around, discovers Rotta on a planet fighting in gladiator battles — and being so ripped that several “Star Wars” fans may put him on their “hear me out” lists. Din also learns that the guy holding Rotta’s fighting contract is … wait for it … Janu Coin.

This is just part of the somewhat twisted plot that director Jon Favreau (“Iron Man”) and his co-writers, Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor, devise in a script only slightly elevated from a couple of back-to-back TV episodes. Where Favreau succeeds is in staging one dynamic action set piece after another, highlighting Din’s skills as a hand-to-hand fighter and his dexterity with a blaster and flame-thrower.

“The Mandalorian and Grogu” also marks the first “Star Wars” live-action movie that isn’t directly or indirectly tied to the fate of the Skywalker family (unless you count the parts Rian Johnson put in “The Last Jedi” that J.J. Abrams tried to memory hole in “The Rise of Skywalker”). It is, as Obi-Wan Kenobi once said, taking the first step into a larger world — but still only baby Yoda steps.  

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‘Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu’

★★★

Opens Friday, May 22, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sci-fi violence and action. Running time: 132 minutes.

Review: 'I Love Boosters,' an absurd satire of fashion and capitalism, shows director Boots Riley at his most brilliant craziness

How much you love “I Love Boosters” will depend on what lever of absurdity and off-the-wall humor you can cram into your eyeballs.

Writer-director Boots Riley kicks up the strangeness well above that of his 2018 feature debut “Sorry to Bother You,” for a feverishly funny satire of fashion and late-stage capitalism that makes The Daniels’ “Everything Everywhere All at Once” look like a neorealist drama.

“Boosters,” the movie informs us early, are fashion-conscious shoplifters, people who steal haute couture from high-end boutiques and sell them at a deep discount. Mariah (Taylour Paige), a member of the Velvet Gang in the Bay Area, says it’s not theft but “fashion-forward philanthropy.” For fellow booster Sade (Naomi Ackie), it’s a way to make some side money to cover the costs of raising two kids.

But for the Velvets’ leader, Corvette (Keke Palmer), it’s about the money and something else: Revenge against one billionaire designer, Christie Smith (played by Demi Moore), who has over the years stolen designs from the internet — including from Corvette herself. And every time Christie declares over social media that she’s creating art while the boosters are “low-class urban bitches,” Corvette’s anger grows larger.

The Velvets target Christie’s chain of stores, Metro Boutiques, each one assigned to sell clothes in monochrome. One store may sell only yellow, so if you want something in green, you have to go to another store. 

Corvette soon discovers, though, that there are others with beefs against Christie. There’s Violeta (Eiza Gonzalez), a Metro Boutique clerk who resents having to sacrifice her paycheck to buy her company-mandated work outfits. And in China, Jianhu (Poppy Liu) is trying to lead a labor movement at the factory that makes Christie’s clothing — and when she and a colleague discover the bosses are experimenting with a teleporter (to save shipping costs), Jianhu suddenly lands in Oakland looking to steal the same clothes the Velvets want.

Riley’s script is endlessly inventive, often going down several paths simultaneously and occasionally in some bizarre and raunchy directions. The smoldering hot character played by Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You” star, LaKeith Stanfield, encapsulates much of the movie’s adults-only humor.

Riley has much of his cast dialed up to 11. There’s Don Cheadle, unrecognizable under prosthetics, as a self-help guru with a pyramid scheme. And Moore is particularly manic as the designer with the delusional sense of her status as an artistic vision. Those overamped performances make you appreciate Ackie’s quiet charms as Corvette’s no-nonsense best friend. 

If there’s a limitation to Riley’s vision in “I Love Boosters,” it’s his budget, particularly in the somewhat distracting special effects and stop-motion animation that illustrate the director’s more insane thoughts. Those shortcomings are minor, and just an indication of how far Riley can go if someone wants to follow him down the rabbit hole.

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‘I Love Boosters’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 22, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, language throughout and brief drug use. Running time: 105 minutes.

Review: 'Steal This Story, Please!' shows firebrand journalist Amy Goodman's work and her drive to tell stories other media won't

I suspect that a lot of journalists, if you gave them truth serum, would say they want to be like Amy Goodman, the fearlessly in-your-face reporter and host of “Democracy Now!,” where she frequently speaks truth to power and goes places the mainstream media won’t go to interview the most disadvantaged people on Earth.

Goodman’s career, and the origins of her hard-charging personality, are given their due in “Steal This Story, Please!,” a documentary that follows her attempts to get the powerful to speak the truth and to give attention to the voiceless.

Directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin (“Trouble the Water”) show us Goodman’s no-compromise style with the opening scene, as she follows one of Donald Trump’s climate advisers through a 2018 global environmental summit. She peppers the guy, P. Wells Griffith III, with questions, and he stays silent. He tells Goodman to call his office to make an appointment, and she asks him for a business card so she can make that call. When he ducks into the U.S. delegation’s office, an aide blocks her — and then refuses to give her the business card Griffith said he’d give her.

Goodman started her journalism career at New York’s independent radio station, WBAI, learning how to work a mic and edit tape as she went. She was a fast editor; a colleague describes how she did an interview only minutes before airtime, then started editing — and played the first half while she still edited the second half.

The story that made Goodman nationally famous was her coverage, with The New Yorker’s freelancer Allan Naim, of a 1991 massacre of East Timorese independence protesters at the hands of the Indonesian military. The Indonesian forces beat Goodman and severely injured Naim, but they got out with the story — highlighting how the Indonesians’ weapons were supplied by the U.S. government, under both Republican and Democratic presidents. The footage got used by U.S. media, and brought the plight of the Timorese to the world’s attention.

Both at WBAI and, since 1996, on the nationally distributed Pacifica Radio, Goodman has covered stories other media wouldn’t touch:

• Her interviews Moreese Bickham, a wrongfully convicted prisoner in the Louisiana State Prison, and got him freed. 

• She aired the prison reports of Mumia Abu-Jamal, on Pennsylvania’s Death Row for his role in killing a cop. 

• On 9/11, she and her crew stayed in their studios, a renovated former firehouse a few blocks from the World Trade Center, and experienced the toxic dust from Ground Zero. 

• She got arrested covering protesters at the 2008 Republican Convention in Minnesota. 

• She told the world about the Native Americans protesting the Dakota Access pipeline. 

The through line of Goodman’s work has been talking to the people outside, the ones on the ground being affected by what the people in power were doing. Sometimes, but not often enough, telling those stories got those powerful people to change their minds. 

“Steal This Story, Please!” showcases Goodman’s work, and her philosophy that any journalist could do what she does, if they want to stand up to their corporate bosses.

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‘Steal This Story, Please!’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, May 22, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for war violence and language. Running time: 102 minutes.