‘Him’ Movie Review: Football Horror Movie Falls Far Short Of Greatness
Photo from Universal Pictures
From Jeremy Kibler
Sacrificing everything to be the best in something gets pushed to bloodied and battered extremes in Him, the first sports horror movie ever (maybe?). Considering there is something already fanatical and cult-like about American sports, a “football horror movie” held plenty of promise, along with Jordan Peele’s involved production company being a crucial selling point. Director Justin Tipping, making his sophomore directorial effort, proves his prowess as a filmmaker with occasionally trippy, nightmarish style and enough ideas for social commentary. Those ingredients certainly help, but they’re the only saving grace in a film that ends up being obvious and muddled without much meat underneath its shoulder pads. Feeling as if the filmmakers started with the core conspiracy and worked backwards, Him is not the Second Coming.
Tyriq Withers (I Know What You Did Last Summer) stars as Cameron “Cam” Cade, a college football star who has since childhood worshipped Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), a pro quarterback for the San Antonio Saviors. Just as his own career is about to take off, Cam suffers a head injury. Going against his doctor, he enters the draft and, as Isaiah nears retirement, gets handpicked to train at his hero’s isolated desert compound. It’s a week-long mini boot camp with no distractions (so you know, no cell phones), just football. To pass the baton, Isaiah has to work Cam hard, grooming him to be the next GOAT (just like Cam’s father’s dying wish). Something is clearly off about Isaiah and his training methods, but it’s all about the sacrifices for a life of glory and fame.
Him tells the tried-and-true narrative where a remote location seems too seductive to be true and our protagonist should listen to their gut and run but does not or cannot (this year’s Opus immediately pops to mind). It should probably be more of a red flag to Cam that the entrance of Isaiah’s property is littered with unhinged, subhuman fans (one of whom is played by scary-good American Horror Story face Naomi Grossman), but hey, life as a star athlete comes with risks.
The viewer waits for the “never meet your heroes” lesson to be learned, aside from a brutally twisted drill with another player on the sidelines repeatedly taking a football to the face by a sped-up machine. Another interesting wrinkle is having Isaiah’s on-staff sports doctor Marco (Jim Jeffries) as the one who keeps injecting Cam with an unspecified drug (the emoticon label, when revealed, is pretty cheeky) but also keeps warning him about the price of being the GOAT. The film does get weirder and weirder as Cam and Isaiah’s mentorship goes along, but oddly enough, it’s never truly tense enough or creepy enough (a sequence in a sauna comes the closest).
Full of bravado and swagger but still able to be sympathetic, Tyriq Withers does have the goods to be the real deal. He is very watchable—not to mention a physically top-notch specimen—even when Cam is hamstrung to be a mostly reactive conduit. Marlon Wayans hasn’t been given this juicy of an off-brand dramatic part since, well, 2000’s A Requiem for a Dream, that it’s a shame his performance doesn’t get to belong in a stronger movie. While Wayans does imbue Isaiah White with charisma, intensity, danger, and unpredictability, the performance starts to feel less controlled and just too over-the-top to take seriously. As Isaiah’s influencer wife Elsie, Julia Fox (Uncut Gems) brings just the right dosage of bizarro and camp with her unusually hypnotic presence (and bleached-blonde eyebrows). She is a scene-stealer but underused, and how Elsie pieces into the bigger picture is head-scratching.
Kira Kelly’s camerawork is dynamic, particularly during the training sequences, and her compositions tend to hold an off-center intimidation to create foreboding. Biblical iconography is inevitable but still striking, and there’s also a lot of stylized “what’s real and what’s trauma?” imagery out of a fever dream mixed with a music video, including X-ray screens when a needle pierces a vein or when bodies collide. It looks cool, but flash is nothing more than flash when it’s in the service of not much.
Successful as a concept and less so in execution, Him could have finally made sports interesting and even more unsettling. It does have a lot on its concussed mind—football is being a man, football is church, football is life—but everything buckles under the weight of so many metaphors made literal in an increasingly silly, hazy, and one-note script by Tipping, Zack Akers, and Skip Bronkie. Any aim to shock is completely missed, and somehow the film seems to think it’s sticking the landing with a surreally staged but spectacularly ridiculous Grand Guignol finale. That’s far from the reality when Him loses purpose and coherence and then just deflates.
Rating: 2/5
Him is currently in theaters.
