Ahead of assembly, Justin Tipping’s football horror Him had the components of a serviceable genre flick. As a child, Cam (Tyriq Withers) was pushed to be a star quarterback by his father with the sort of 30 for 30 intensity that’s produced sports’ greatest legends. After Cam is attacked by a mysterious — perhaps demonic — figure on the field, his jeopardized career is salvaged by his childhood hero, Isiah White (Marlon Wayans), who takes Cam under his wing for a week of training to see if he’s got what it takes to be the next GOAT. At Isiah’s monolithic compound, Cam endures a series of hellishly escalating training regimens, until the darkness of the industry cracks through to reveal its Leviathan face. Or, at least, ostensibly. In execution, Him is so bafflingly muddled that you have to wonder whether Tipping has any criticisms of the NFL beyond a bum fantasy draft.
Cam and Isiah’s seven training days are announced with blood-red title cards that bear the generic principles of sports docs’ grand tradition: POISE, LEADERSHIP, SACRIFICE. They’re the sort of broad, hypermasculine epithets that have come to define American football culture, inarticulate detritus that might have served for prescient satire in more capable hands. Instead, Tipping meets these meathead maxims where they’re at. The bootcamp sessions — comprising an overwhelming majority of Him’s 96 minutes — are rendered with the curiosity of a Gatorade commercial.
There are whisps of early-draft inspiration, most of which come via Wayans’ bombastic and monomaniacal Isiah, who doubles as Him’s brittle proof of life. Isiah is facing retirement, and while he awaits the passing of the guard, he spends his days running footage of old plays and curing taxidermized kills from his hunting sessions on the compound’s desert acreage. Isiah looks and sounds like any of the aging greats of real life. He bounds with charisma, a deity who breezes through interviews and reveals only enough darkness to keep you interested. It’s fertile ground for investigation: what does a god do when it’s time to hang up the jersey?
The answer, apparently, is not much. Even as Isiah’s program tips the scales from demanding to psychotic, Him remains dogmatically averse to insight. Isiah pushes Cam to be a killer, to sacrifice everything to the game, to stop at nothing in pursuit of being number one. Without Wayans in the lead, you might expect to hear the same from a high school coach Zynning his way through a hangover. The movie’s body horror is similarly uninspired. Save for a few stunning edits of thermal and X-ray footage that could have come from Aggro Dr1ft’s edit bay, Him’s violence feels rote and algorithmic, a producer’s note after monitoring The Substance’s streaming returns. Needles plunge into skin, bones and helmets collide and crack, and Cam lines up for the next drill, rarely emerging changed beyond a little flop sweat.
Tyriq Withers shoulders some of the blame for Him’s floundering lead. As Cam, he’s stone-faced and inflexible, less a movie star than a beleaguered linebacker mumbling his way through a postgame interview. But Him’s biggest vulnerability is its ruptured tendon of a script. Surfacing as a Blacklist draft from Skip Bronkie and Zack Akers, Him is unstructured and distracted; it flips through its ideas — CTE, faith, the majority white ownership of a majority Black league — like surfing channels during halftime. But Withers isn’t the only one who struggles to elevate the film’s wooden characters and dialogue: while Tim Heidecker and Julia Fox, comic-relief pinch hitters in any other scenario, do what they can to inject some life into their roles as Cam’s manager and Isiah’s influencer girlfriend, they ultimately sputter within Him’s slurry of half-baked reflection.
What little Him does manage to say is filtered through ham-fisted metaphors so strained they threaten career-ending injuries. Isiah cut his fame playing for a team called the Saviors, a name whose hard-winking nudges are reinforced by crucifixes, a gaggle of cult-like fans that border Isiah’s compound, and transfusions and injections that threaten stigmata. American football has such well-documented ties to Judeo-Christian tradition that a Christ allegory all but writes itself, but Him approaches the man-to-god pipeline so incuriously that Isiah’s seraphic status functions as little more than set decoration.
Then there’s the GOAT, a term that’s broken through sports talk with such ubiquity that it could refer to either Tom Brady or your colleague who brought donuts to the office. The menacing shadow that attacks Cam in the movie’s first act is styled as something of a mascot Baphomet and continues to haunt his shadow through most of the movie. It’s unclear whether this creature is internal to Cam or a mechanism of Him’s ultimate evil, nor does it seem to matter: Tipping appears more intent on underlining his 1:1 metaphor than exploring it. Him never bothers to question the motives that drive us to be the best, the prophet worship behind canonized sports legends, the industry’s demand for a sacrificial lamb. In Tipping’s hands, sometimes a goat is just a goat.
Him‘s graces are so far and few between that they shine without competition. Kira Kelly’s cinematography paints a staggering vision of Isiah’s labyrinthian compound, and composer Bobby Krlic continues a generational run of destabilizing scores after his work with Ari Aster. But no paint job can save the movie from itself, as Him boasts all the depth of a Barstool Instagram reel. It’s a hollow, creatine-laden Midsommar that places its bets on a distracted audience checking another game’s score.
DIRECTOR: Justin Tipping; CAST: Tyriq Withers, Marlon Wayans, Julia Fox, Tim Heidecker, Jim Jefferies; DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures; IN THEATERS: September 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 36 min.
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