Skip to main content
Some say masculinity is acknowledging a relationship to violence, and defining on which side of that violence you stand. Marketing for Him teased exploring that relationship, but Justin Tipping’s athletic horror film fumbles far from the end zone (the sports puns that follow are being flung by a nonsports fan, so bear with me). Despite bearing Jordan Peele’s name as executive producer, Him fails to delve into the textually rich subjects it references—American masculinity, spirituality, health care, privacy, sociopolitical conditions that make athletes risk their bodies for a chance at a chance of making it, and these are just off the cuff—instead relying on superficial pageantry to run 96 minutes off the clock.
After surviving an attack by a deranged fan, rising football star Cam Cade (Tyriq Withers) is invited to the private and remote desert compound of aging star Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans) and his wife, Elsie (Julia Fox). White is one of this world’s GOAT players—Greatest of All Time, if like Meryl Streep you didn’t know that—and might retire from the Saviors football team; Cade could take his place. Cade accepts the invite, despite literally everyone knowing he’s recovering from a traumatic brain injury. White’s sports doc, Marco (Jim Jefferies), injects Cade with a mysterious substance and administers all sorts of treatments that on just a cursory level feel medically reckless (and are, per Google!) as the training camp gets weirder.
Him starts off like it will delve into the aforementioned topics: A TV announcer describes sports as “theater with real consequences” while fighter jets roar over a stadium, spewing red, white and blue smoke to demonstrate just one of the well-funded arms connecting sports to industries like medicine, communications and the military. The Cade family’s shrine to White and the Saviors feels true to sports worship, with the team’s visually unsettling tinsel monster mascot feeling like a sight gag more than a real team’s emblem. Him gestures at fanatical devotion in the sports world, but it doesn’t examine what builds that sense of unity and camaraderie among players and spectators.
The Cade family’s dynamics are only hinted at. Cam’s father (Don Benjamin) makes his young son rewatch footage of White’s gruesome and nearly career-ending injury religiously, as an example of “what real men do,” but the elder Cade serves about as much use as the overused Dead Wife trope. Hardly any of the other characters are better developed. Withers brings as much personality as Cade’s cardboard cutout, but that might have been an intentional choice. Wayans is a low-effort creep in this role, while nobody really explains why exactly Jeffries’ doctor is so jaded. Fox plays herself, but is underutilized. Naomi Grossman plays a caricature of a Southwestern white woman. Tierra Whack shows up.
One practically hears Him’s writing team—it took three men to write a script this dull—humming Cake’s song “Sheep Go to Heaven” as they build the movie’s lore. GOAT spells goat, and where do goats go? Arizona, apparently. Footballs were called pig skins…what if someone wore a pig skin mask? What if we suffocate our star as a metaphor for suffocating fame? Ooo. What if an audience crowd shot looked like an eye? Whoa, man.
The history of American football is loosely referenced, but the idea that the National Football League has a multigenerational occult cabal just feels silly, even though the sports world’s upper echelons are full of eccentric weirdos. But much like the Faig Ahmed tapestry crowded into the Whites’ foyer, the movie begs for deeper meaning but doesn’t bother unpacking it. “A free agent with nothing to lose” with the word “faith” tattooed across his tatters gets brutalized by having footballs lobbed at his face to punish Cade, which is about how subtle any of Him’s symbology is. Also, it’s not even hot—how unsexy this movie manages to be despite a cast loaded with pretty people’s peak physiques must be studied (Fox is the gays’ consolation prize). These guys will do anything for male validation, but that attention and affirmation’s intoxicating effect is largely unexplored.
If anything, Him succeeds as a conversation starter about the topics it brings up, as I now very much want to know what the men and sports fans in my life think of this one. We culturally need men to open up about their experiences, but we also need something deeper than “men face pressure.” Him offers plenty of pain and nearly no gain. R. ANDREW JANKOWSKI. St. Johns Twin Cinemas, Studio One, AMC, Cinemark and Regal locations.
