½ ★ (½ out of 4)
We all know football can be a brutal game—the broken bones, the brain injuries, the selling of your soul to the devil for a fat contract. “Him,” from producer Jordan Peele and director-cowriter Justin Tipping, has the bright idea to put the horror in the horrible, to create a surreal nightmare out of watching Marlon Wayans train Tyriq Withers how to play the game with one intention only—to make him the GOAT and then destroy him.
That sounds like a hell of a movie. Sadly, “Him” is the cinematic equivalent of hell—on your nerves, on your sanity, on your ability to stay conscious while watching it.
The scares are meant to start when Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers), a college quarterback about to go pro, gets his skull bashed by a team mascot in what looks like a pagan ritual out of Ari Aster’s “Midsommar,” a film that knew how to do this scare stuff better. Cam’s subsequent brain damage has his mind crawling with demonic hallucinations which dance around on screen like a bad acid trip.
What to do? On the advice of his superfan father, Cam decides to enlist the proffered help from San Antonio Saviors quarterback and eight-time champion Isaiah White, played by Marlon Wayans in a performance so laced with mirth and malice that it deserves to be in a better film. Withers, a former college wide receiver, looks the part but can’t give it any depth. It’s Isaiah who tells Cam to come to his eerily isolated compound in the Texas desert (“No, thank you” sprung to my mind but not Cam’s) where he can train him to be his successor. Yeah, right.
Watching ‘Him’ is the cinematic equivalent of hell—on your nerves, on your sanity, on your ability to stay conscious while watching it.
This isn’t the first time Tipping loses control of his film’s tone, which suddenly becomes a gridiron “All About Eve” with the two QBs sniping at each other with fake smiles pasted on their faces. Isaiah knows the team owners are ready to replace him with Cam at a moment’s notice, so the younger player must stop the switch by any means necessary.
Before I start bashing “Him” for degenerating into scare stupidity, let me compliment the film’s team for nailing the real horrors of training. Take the JUGS machine in which two motorized tires, mounted on a stand, shoot footballs at players to catch. That’s real. So is the scene in which we see a football repeatedly whack a player’s face bloody. Later, as players’ bodies are pummeled, the screen becomes an X-ray of the damage being done.
What else does “Him” get right? The image of Black athletes putting their bodies and brains on the line for white investors is all too familiar in the sports world. And yet “Him” does next to nothing to develop the theme into something compelling or even coherent.
The filmmakers are so proud of the idea that the church of football is an inversion of Christianity that they keep pounding it to death, loading their film with symbolic devils of racism, exploitation, you name it, that quickly devolve into frightfest silliness.
Other characters offer comic relief, such as the resident sports doctor (Jim Jefferies) who gives the naked Cam a public physical, the overeager agent (a delightful Tim Heidecker), and Isaiah’s influencer wife, played by Julia Fox who lets her scene-stealing bleached eyebrows do the acting for her.
It all ends, I write with relief, with the equivalent of an acid trip halftime show laced with visual absurdities, including devil worship and a visual reenactment of the “The Last Supper.” Early on, Isaiah confiscates Cam’s phone, claiming that he wants his protégé to experience “radical detachment.” Me? I couldn’t get detached fast enough.