Travis Knight has, with his 2018 Transformers spin-off, Bumblebee, already achieved something close to impossible, having fashioned a genuinely touching coming-of-age drama from franchise effluent.
The director, who is also chief executive of the Laika animation studio, could justifiably retire in glory to some sun-baked island. But no. He now takes on another daunting challenge concerning another toy-flogging saga.
Remember Masters of the Universe? Maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re too young to have experienced Mattel’s notorious efforts, in the 1980s, to sell Gen X kids action figures through the medium of lobotomised space opera. (The phenomenon was sufficiently notable for Tom Wolfe to riff repeatedly on it in The Bonfire of the Vanities.)
Against the odds, Knight has pulled it off again. Combining the small-screen cartoon’s brash aesthetics – the neon whoosh is sickeningly retro – with sharp, self-conscious wit, this Masters of the Universe dances gaily, to quote This Is Spinal Tap, on the “fine line between stupid and clever”.
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There are reminders of Mike Hodges’s Flash Gordon, from 1980, but Knight has a much surer sense of purpose. Everything here is funny on purpose. The chaos is precisely ordered.
If you’re approaching with tongue in cheek (a perfectly respectable strategy) you may find the opening section a little too much to digest. We are on the planet Eternia, where the evil Skeletor (Jared Leto) is in the process of overthrowing King Randor (James Purefoy) and dispatching young Prince Adam (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt) into distant exile.
Imagine the beginning of Superman as produced by Roger Corman at his most vulgar: cheap dialogue bought off the rail, pantomime costumes in My Little Pony shades.
When we get to Earth, however, the film-makers’ ironic intentions become apparent. Knight skips Adam’s remaining childhood – none of that Clark-Kent-on-the-prairie stuff – to find the young man (now a delightfully game Nicholas Galitzine) working miserably in an Oklahoma office.
So what did human resources do to the writers of this film? The most unexpected turn here is an insistent, and consistently funny, satirical dig at the euphemistic, passive-aggressive language of that profession. An hour later, fighting intergalactic despots with skulls as heads, he is still seeking to resolve conflict through team management (or whatever).
The stuff on our planet is an absolute blast. Working in hits by The Cure and 4 Non Blondes, and so bookending the 1980s, Knight stages comic conflagrations with a gusto that is always at home to sci-fi slapstick.
At least one of the trailers puzzlingly sold the film as a straight-up fantasy that asks us to take these characters seriously. The finished film is, in contrast, forever dabbing its eyes at the hilarious absurdity of it all.
But there is no sense of ridicule. As Adam travels the nation’s comic-book stores in search of the magical sword he lost when skidding through space, the film remains at one with the comfort such childhood diversions provide throughout adult life. Nostalgists in their 40s and 50s will feel much at home.
Galitzine, the handsome young British actor from Bottoms and The Idea of You, captures just the right blend of bravery and amiable ingenuousness. This may not, at first, be the sort of fellow you would trust to recapture a planet, but he is always the type likely to brighten a dull day.
It adds to the comic menace that Leto’s Skeletor sounds like an American social climber putting on a shaky English accent to impress his supposed betters. The parade of double entendres, many based around nicknames for Prince Adam’s superpowered chums, offer accidental enlightenment about what you can get away with on a 12A cert.
All solid good fun. All professionally honed. A minor miracle.
In cinemas from Wednesday, June 3rd
