Movie Review: ‘Him’ fumbles a potent premise
American society supposedly puts more pressure on producing a good quarterback than anything else which makes it all the more confounding that the Jets can never have one OK OK So that s not necessarily the takeaway from Him a new horror thriller about the religious fervor that goes with football For several of us long-suffering fans football inspires less Messianic zeal than an annual reminder that this is a dark and cruel world and any delusional preseason hope will be hurriedly and thoroughly snuffed out But Jets fan or not Him has a decent point to make about QB hero worship These are modern gladiators But if the issue of specific thrillers is that they have nothing to say the complication with Him is that it has exactly one thing to say which it does again and again and again Him does have particular style though Directed by Justin Tipping Kicks and produced by Jordan Peele Him was made with the potent premise of bringing the kind of dark satirical perspective that characterizes a Monkeypaw production to our violent national pastime But that promise gets fumbled in an allegorical chamber play that grows increasingly tedious Cameron Cam Cade grew up idolizing Saviors quarterback Isaiah White Marlon Wayans As a boy he watches White win a tournament on a highlight-reel play that also leaves the QB with a career-threatening injury That s what real men do his father Don Benjamin tells him They make sacrifices Fourteen years later Cam Tyriq Withers is on the cusp of entering the pros as a top draft pick Just before the combine though Cam while practicing alone at night is struck in the head by a strange pagan spirit-slash-mascot that emerges out of the shadows The trauma to the head adds a new hazard to Cam s football playing But if you re expecting a horror version of s Concussion that s a small part of what Him aspires to be about The Saviors reach out to Cam s agent Tim Heidecker and offer a unique opportunity Come to Isaiah s Texas desert compound to train with him for a week Isaiah is still in the league and by now despite the long-ago injury has gone on to win a Tom Brady-like haul of championships After a week the Saviors will decided if they ll draft Cam But what follows over seven days is less a boot camp than a disorienting psychodrama a kind of football ayahuasca in which the very intense Isaiah pushes Cam to extremes to test whether he has it in him to be the GOAT The atmosphere is surreal and the editing hallucinatory Cam is injected with unknown serums blood gets transfused and pocket-passing drills turn grisly This is not a encounter Cam is narrated more than once To paraphrase Dani Rojas football is life and maybe death too By settling the movie into Isaiah s Brutalist estate Him take what could have been something grander and turns into effectively into a battle for QB albeit one with more primal underpinnings than your average depth-chart contest But it s likely a bad sign for your satire if you have to take reality altogether out of it and instead hole up inside a haunted house There are a minimal folks around including Isaiah s influencer wife Julia Fox but somewhere far outside of the frame of Him is an enormous football world of arenas screaming fans and broadcasters the world that a movie like Any Given Sunday rushed to capture not evade Him ends up feeling like a gladiator movie that forgot the Colosseum Him a Universal Pictures release is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong bloody violence language throughout sexual material nudity and various drug use Running time minutes One and a half stars out of four Source
