‘Him’ Review
The cult of football.
Him is a patently ridiculous movie. It is over the top, ultra campy, hamstrung by a ludicrous religious metaphor, and edited like a TikToker was having a stroke while jabbing at effects buttons.
I kind of dug it?
Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) is a hotshot quarterback coming out of college and headed for the UFFL or some such (for reasons that become exceedingly clear, the NFL would not in a billion years lend it or its teams’ branding to this movie). Cam has the potential to be the GOAT—the greatest of all time—thanks to his domineering father, a seemingly sociopathic football dad who made his son watch Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans) get his leg snapped in half, Theismann-style, over and over again as a kid. But before he can get to the scouting combine, where the potential draftees demonstrate their physical prowess, Cam gets brutally attacked by a masked man, suffering a horrible concussion.
Unsure if he’s going to be drafted, Cam is thrilled when his agent (Tim Heidecker) calls him up and says, hey, good news, Isaiah White himself is inviting you to his terrifying compound in the middle of the desert to embark on a weeklong minicamp surrounded by groupies dressed like devils and castoff war boys from the Fury Road set where you will be isolated from your family and friends and subjected to physical endurance tests that would kill most men.
So, you know, football practice.
The complete and utter brutality of football, America’s gladiatorial pastime and the last unifying remnant of the monoculture, is front and center throughout Him. From White’s early leg injury to the brain damage suffered by Cam to the shocking imagery of a free agent taking pigskin to the face over and over again when Cam messes up in a drill to the drug cocktails injected into Cam by White’s personal trainer (Jim Jefferies) to the overarching theme of football as a sort of human sacrifice, director and cowriter Justin Tipping never lets us forget that football is a very, very violent game. Bet you feel bad about cheering on that Red Zone quadbox now, don’t you?1
Him gets away with its didacticism about the nature of men using their heads as battering rams because of the gleefully manic performances throughout, particularly the one delivered by Marlon Wayans. It’s one of the few onscreen turns I’ve ever seen where I was genuinely unsure which register the next line would be delivered in at any given moment. Is this line going to be a shouter, a squeaker, a whisper, a wail … what’s next? What’s gonna happen? Wayans is very obviously having fun here, and that frenzied joie de vivre comes through on the screen.
Heidecker and Jefferies, two comedians, leaven the action with a pinch of comic brassiness, helping Him rise out of pure muckiness and into something with some laughs. And Julia Fox, who plays White’s wife as a sort of Gwyneth Paltrow-esque influencer, is game for embodying the film’s more insane third-act turns.
And look, Him really is an absolutely bonkers movie, a deeply silly picture that careens into outright nuttiness over the last half hour or so. It is also the sort of movie that we would once have described as being edited “like a music video” and now feels more like something you’d see in a montage of clips about social media posts that give kids epileptic fits. All rapid-fire, filter-enhanced cuts that never give the eye a chance to rest. It’s rarely soothing, though that’s by design: This is a movie designed to agitate the blood.
Agitated I was, but I was also never bored, and I applaud all involved for leaning into the outrageousness of the premise. It’s the sort of movie that seems destined for cult status (fitting, given the premise of football as a literal death cult) after first-run audiences aren’t sure what to do with its extravagant performances and overblown acting.
I mean, I personally do not, no, but I’m sure someone out there does.
"Bet you feel bad about cheering on that Red Zone quadbox now, don’t you?1" Yes, Sonny, but only because I regret everything, including wanting to see this.
I won’t see it, but that is because I “watch” maybe three movies a year (I’m 90% blind) and I don’t get movies as such. Getting me to a big screen is a waste of time and money. The last movie I watched in a theater was the Dark Knight and I was like, “this is great, wish I could see it all.” It’s almost as much fun to read and listen to Sonny and his gang.