It’s not just that He-Man himself is from the 80s that gives 2026’s Masters of the Universe such an aggressive throwback vibe. It’s that trying to assemble a film around the haphazard mythology of a toy and dusting off IP that precious few still care about feels like something Hollywood has slowly been doing a bit less of, especially on a scale such as this.

This year, hits have relied on either properties that audiences do have passion for (Scream, Michael Jackson, Mario, The Devil Wears Prada) or, radically, original ideas (Obsession, Backrooms, Goat, Hoppers). We haven’t endured an Underworld sequel or a Tarzan reboot since 2016, a Terminator film since 2019, a Dolittle reboot since 2020 or a GI Joe spin-off since 2021. Mattel might then have struck gold with Greta Gerwig’s Barbie in 2023, but that was both an unconventional, auteur-led one-off and based on a product millions were still buying on the regular (the year before release, the brand made more than $1.4bn). Various directors, from John Woo to Jon M Chu, have been loosely attached to a He-Man movie over the years and various studios, from Sony to Netflix, have tried (the latter streamer having spent a reported $30m on a failed attempt) but, as with many long-gestating projects in Hollywood, those involved forgot to remember Jeff Goldblum’s evergreen Jurassic Park line: “So preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

It turns out they really shouldn’t have. 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. Even for those who used to (I count myself among them), there’s nothing here that’s clever or funny or exciting enough to explain why that amber light finally turned green. The story surrounding He-Man was always just an absurdly cobbled together justification for making and selling more action figures and the film, from Bumblebee director Travis Knight, wants to poke fun at its goofy silliness in one moment while also taking it seriously in the next, and that’s the defining problem here – every line, performance and story turn crippled by indecision. There’s not quite enough winking ridicule to make it a knowing parody (it’s also astonishingly unfunny), or enough earnest emotion to make it a rousing adventure. It often feels like the film’s four writers are deliberately working against each other, as if each new draft was made somehow worse than the last.

It makes for an extremely awkward and entirely unfulfilling viewing experience but a mildly fascinating one in parts, to watch a world being built for a franchise we’ll most likely never return to, with early tracking suggesting this will be one of the summer’s biggest flops. File it alongside Universal’s Dark Universe or the big screen Golden Compass or, more recently, the Chris Pine-led Dungeons and Dragons, a slightly more efficient example of what this film should have been aiming for.

It’s also an odd fit for lead Nicholas Galitzine, better known for soppy romantic leads in The Idea of You and Red, White and Royal Blue, who has buffed up to play Adam AKA He-Man, who was sent away from the magical land of Eternia as a child when it was taken over by the nefarious Skeletor (Jared Leto, trying for his best Ian McKellen impersonation). Down on Earth, he’s taken up a job in human resources, his childhood of being trained to use combat to resolve conflict now overtaken by an adult life where he must defuse situations through his words. When his sword is rediscovered, he’s transported back home by old friend Teela (Camila Mendes) and must save the world he used to love from forces of evil.

While the original cartoon was beloved at the time, a live-action 80s attempt to drag it to the big screen was a much-ridiculed, franchise-pausing disaster (original He-Man Dolph Lundgren makes a thankless cameo here), criticised as one of the many low-rent attempts to conjure some Star Wars magic. There’s a bit of that here too, as well as some Superman and a considerable helping of James Gunn’s Guardians trilogy, but nothing that could ever be classed as being of its own. The writers like to tell us things are “getting weird” and “a little very crazy”, but they’re just never weird or crazy enough and proudly telling us this on a loop just makes it feel that much more boringly normal. You can feel the struggle of trying to cram everything in and even at an unforgivably bloated 143 minutes, it’s both busy and hollow. There are vague, underbaked life lessons about masculinity and the need to balance brain and brawn, a “who cares” romance between two leads who have zero chemistry, lazy comic support from two actors who deserve better (a drunk Idris Elba happily collecting more franchise money and the baffling voice of Kristen Wiig as a robot), an Amazon delivery van cameo (!) and choppily edited action scenes that confuse maximalism with excitement (for a film that cost so much money, it often looks surprisingly cheap – figure out your lighting issue, Hollywood!).

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. You’ll be sadly stuck in your seat, confused as to why you’re not watching something else.

• Masters of the Universe is out in cinemas on 5 June