There’s a lot that’s wrong with Americans’ fixation on football and the men who risk serious injury to play it, and Justin Tipping’s Him works hard to get that message across. Tyriq Withers stars as Cameron Cade, a disciplined athlete who has a shot at playing in a fictitious national league that absolutely is not the NFL. As he trains alone one night on a deserted football field, a mysterious something appears out of nowhere and administers a blow that could derail his career. Motivated largely by his desire to please his dead father, who bullied him into believing that toughness is the essence of manhood, Cade insists on pushing past his injury and pursuing his dream. He’s thrilled to accept an invitation to spend a week doing some heavy-duty training with his idol, star quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), at White’s remote desert compound.
White is on his way out; Cade is on his way up. But out there in the desert, weird things begin to happen. White has dreamed up some very strange and sadistic drills. It becomes clear that Cade, who begins to suffer odd hallucinations—or are they real?—is at White’s mercy, as well as just being the next young cog in the big-business machine of football, run largely by white men. If you feel an extended, movie-length treatise on the evils of the football establishment sneaking up on you—or, more accurately, whacking you on the head—you wouldn’t be wrong.
The problem with Him isn’t that it’s about something. You could argue that whatever strengths the movie has lie in its originality: if there’s another horror movie out there about the evils of the U.S. football establishment, I’ve certainly never seen it, and the early scenes of Him show some promise. Cade is born into a family where football is a kind of religion; unsubtly, the gang’s favorite team, and the one White plays for, is called the Saviors. Tipping hints at an aura of menace surrounding young Cade, some dark, pseudospiritual force threatening to pull him in. But as Him trundles on, its ideas loom ever larger, to the point of stultifying obviousness. The script, by Tipping, Zack Akers, and Skip Bronkie, spells out the movie’s aims in big, cheerleading letters. (Jordan Peele produced the picture.) Midway through the movie, White announces to Cade that he has his own take on the classic American mantra of “God, Family, Football”; for him, it’s “Football, Family, God.” His sinister motives are so blatant that they leave nothing to the imagination.
That’s a shame, because Tipping makes some interesting stylistic touches, and as Cade, Withers has an eager, winsome quality; the last thing you want is to see him turned into a killer on the field. As White urges Cade to ever-mounting acts of aggro monstrousness, we see the action in X-ray vision: as two men butt heads, their brains are nothing more than blurry blobs encased in that fragile shell known as skull, barely protected by their helmets. A little earlier, we’ve heard one character intone, “It turns out that human skulls aren’t designed to smash into each other.” Over and over, Him both shows and tells, when one or the other would be enough. It’s the kind of movie that leaves you feeling indifferent rather than chilled to the bone, clobbered into numbness with good intentions.