Football is like a religion in America. That’s a juicy premise for a horror movie that conflates one with the other. But just as the most clever play on paper can get botched by the 11 players on the field, Him fumbles a solid premise with a tedious, one-note execution that delivers very few scares and zero insights into either of its central subjects.
The Biblical imagery starts immediately and never lets up. Little Cameron Cade, cross dangling from his neck, grows up in a family obsessed with the San Antonio Saviors, one of the top teams in the “USFF.” The Cade home contains what might be described as an altar to the football gods, chief among them the Saviors’ star quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). After Isaiah wins a big game at the cost of a gruesome leg injury, Cam’s father forces his son to stare at the grotesque wound on the television. Victory, he explains, requires sacrifice.
READ MORE: The 10 Best Horror Movies of the Last 10 Years
Some years later, Cam (Tyriq Withers) is the top quarterback in college ball and a consensus #1 pick — until he’s the victim of a bizarre attack at the hands of a man in a weird monster costume. Cam recovers, but not quickly enough to participate in the Draft Combine. And then wouldn’t you know it? That’s when he receives an unexpected invitation from Isaiah White, now nearing the end of an incredible career. He wants Cam to come train with him at his home in the desert. When Cam arrives, he finds a cult of fans camped out at the entrance to Isaiah’s training complex, housed in an underground bunker. (He even lights most of the rooms in ominous red, just in case the hellish imagery wasn’t obvious enough.)
It doesn’t take a martyr with prophetic visions to see where this is headed. That’s the main problem with Him, a glossy, well-shot, well-cast, slickly-edited production that telegraphs every single trick up its sleeve. There isn’t one single second where Isaiah doesn’t seem like he’s up to something. (When Cam shows up, Isaiah is right in the middle of cleaning some animal carcasses and hammering nails into pelts, as one does when one is a normal human being who’s not doing something sinister and evil.)
Nearly every scene is grim, shadowy, and menacing. (The cinematography, by Kira Kelly, certainly evokes a spooky mood.) Within minutes of Cam’s arrival at Isaiah’s training facility, strange men start sticking him with needles and measuring his muscles. From there, Him plods along with the young prospect on his dark journey into football’s seedy underbelly of performance-enhancing drugs, deranged fans, and shocking violence, but it never digs any deeper into our national obsession with football, or draws any sort of emotional resonance from Cam’s quest for greatness or Isaiah’s fear of obsolescence.
Both leads try their best with the meager material they’ve been given, but director Justin Tipping offers endless extreme close-ups of Withers and Wayans and lots of quick flashes of surreal religious imagery in lieu of actually probing beneath these characters’ muscular surfaces. The best performance in the film actually comes from Julia Fox, playing Isaiah’s glamorous and outgoing trophy wife. Fox raises the energy level onscreen each of the handful of times she appears; she’s really the only one in the movie who gets to do anything other than hit the same note of artsy foreboding over and over again.
The biggest name on Him’s poster is Jordan Peele, the singular horror auteur who produced this movie through his Monkeypaw Productions. Thus far, Peele’s movies as a director have been beyond reproach. His movies as a producer, well, it appears you can reproach those a little bit. None of Peele’s own films play out this predictably, with so few surprises or so little to say while aiming for some sort of grand statement about the intersection of sports, wealth, and celebrity. By the time Him attempts a shock value Hail Mary finale, I had grown so tired of its repetitive storyline I had to restrain myself from very loudly using the Lord’s name in vain.
RATING: 3/10
.webp?format=1500w "OPEN WORLD Revealed With Wild First Footage and a Robin Williams Tribute — GeekTyrant")
