2025 | rated R | starring Tyriq Winthers, Marlon Wayans | directed by Justin Tipping | 1 hr 36 min | 1 out of 5 stars |
An up-and-coming football quarterback, Cam Cade (Tyriq Winters, I Know What You Did Last Summer) is invited to train with his hero and the current GOAT, Isiah White (Marlon Wayans) at his isolated desert compound. However, over the course of rigorous training Isiah’s trials turn into games of physical and psychological torment with a group of acolytes and increasingly bizarre behavior all around Cam.
It’s pretty well known the vast difference in quality control between a Jordan Peele-directed movie and a Jordan Peele production. The first, a multi-layered, skillfully made horror event. The latter, more of an attempt to capture the zeitgeist, with a remake of Candyman, HBO’s Lovecraft Country and Paramount’s remake of The Twilight Zone not connecting. I say that to say that gap has never been wider than it is with Him, a movie that makes every other Jordan Peele-produced product look masterful by comparison. Him is a formless, faceless, nothing of a movie that fumbles around for its entire running time trying to find something to say about the American obsession with football – and then to shove that into a horror movie. I seems to feel there is a parallel in there somewhere but can never find it.
In truth, Him is less a football-as-cult horror movie as much as it is Whiplash on the gridiron. Wayans (taking a paycheck to finance Scary Movie 6) brings an appropriate level of charisma, menace and weirdness to the role of the teacher who pushes his student to the breaking point in order to build them up into greatness. In director Justin Tipping’s version this takes the form of Isiah throwing Cam off kilter with mind games, offering his girlfriend up to him as a test, CTE references and a lengthy training exercise that punishes one of Isiah’s groupees by launching a ball rocket into his face whenever Cam can’t complete a no-look-pass. While it spends much of its time in Whiplash mode, attempting to visualize Cam having a hallucinatory mental breakdown, the film is also constantly hinting at something more sinister, even supernatural or demonic, going on in the background. When the other shoe finally does drop, it does so with a feather. An explanation that feels like a parody of a horror movie final reveal.
Him is constantly at odds with itself, annoyingly opaque and ultimately coming up with nothing to say. Tipping shoots everything like a music video instead of a thriller. The movie is claustrophobic and not in the way it’s trying to isolate us with Cam, but small and tightly shot. It’s full of random bizarre imagery that doesn’t quite creep out but gets a lot of mileage out of weird looking generic quasi-NFL mascots. Its use of “GOAT” is laid on so thick it feels like an obvious lampshading of a secret devil-worshipping subplot to be revealed. That’s about as clever as the metaphors get and as deep as the themes get. There’s a lot of pressure to be great in football, man.
It’s unclear what Tipping is trying to say here, if anything. If the movie wanted to satirize what it circles around – our national obsession as a cult and our treatment of athletes as Gods – it feels like it needs to be bigger than a chamber film mind-game between two guys. The stakes higher. The cult weirder. When it finally gets to the climactic bloodbath, it hasn’t earned the cheer-the-hero revenge catharsis it so desperately wants. Or has seen work in other movies that it wants to emulate. Him is a dull, incoherent, poorly paced, poorly edited and wholly unpleasant experience without much invention to it. Worse, it feels like a gargantuan missed opportunity. There is a truly juicy nugget of a satire buried deep beneath the obvious in here and the movie lacks either the guts or the creativity to touch it.