A rock-brained football horror movie that’s as subtle as being sacked by a 300 lb. defensive lineman and somehow only half as much fun, Justin Tipping’s “Him” is a single idea stretched out for half the length of an NFL broadcast (spoiler alert: half of an eternity is still an eternity). That idea: What if football was literally a religion? Holy shit. But wait, there’s more. What if the sport’s chosen one narratives, hyper-zealous fandoms, and national Sunday worship services weren’t an extension of Christianity, but rather a demonic inversion of it? What if becoming a god meant signing a contract with the devil, and getting there required otherwise good men to sacrifice a lot more than just their free time? That would be so crazy.
Self-evident as that concept might be to anyone who’s ever heard of America, there’s no denying the potential of a bold genre film that dared to confront the dehumanizing barbarity of our country’s most profitable sports league; the pronounced indifference it has for the health of its players, the structural racism that continues to undergird the entire apparatus, the short-term riches it offers in order to offset the true cost of pursuing immortality. “Him” is not that film.
Less “‘The Devil’s Advocate’ meets ‘Any Given Sunday’” than a “Black Mirror” episode with advanced CTE, this dull look at the dark underbelly of an organization that’s plainly evil on its surface wants all the glory of a championship season without so much as breaking a sweat. Its characters are constantly nattering on about the price of greatness, but the self-satisfied movie around them seems content with mediocrity from the moment it starts — every setpiece a punt that Tipping, Zack Akers, and Skip Bronkie’s see-through script celebrates like a touchdown. By the time “Him” finally lets loose during a final sequence that’s staged like a Super Bowl halftime show (a full surrender to post-ironic kitsch at the end of an airless film that spends 90 percent of its story on a series of training exercises), I struggled to remember what it was supposedly playing for in the first place.
Who is Him? Will, that’s a loaded question. For the last 20 years or so, legendary San Antonio Saviors (lol) quarterback and eight-time champion Isaiah White was unambiguously He. But time makes goons of us all, and while injuries have never done much to slow Isaiah down — not even the one where a bone pierced right through his leg on national TV — the fact that he’s played by a 53-year-old Marlon Wayans is finally catching up with him (Wayans is always exceptional as a dramatic actor, and the shark-eyed intensity he brings to this movie is the only thing that holds it together). There are even rumors that he might be retiring at the end of the next season, and, I don’t know, becoming the world’s most hardcore canasta player or something.
How do you replace a GOAT? Well, farmers tend to find it pretty easy, actually, but the football community turns its attention to star prospect and presumptive first draft pick Cameron Cade (“I Know What You Did Last Summer” actor, former college wide-receiver, and Pro Bowl-worthy hot person Tyriq Withers). Could he be Him?? Or “Him Kardashian,” as his agent — a delightfully shit-eating but sorely overqualified Tim Heidecker — suggests? “Himothée Chalamet??” Him Cameron? Him Wenders? Him Jong Il? Sorry, this was by far my favorite part of the movie and I’m trying to pad this thing out as much as I can.
Cameron’s dead dad certainly thought his son had greatness in Him, and Cameron has grown up hellbent on proving him right. Alas, just a few days before the combine, the generational talent is conked in the head by a giant samurai(?) who appears out of nowhere on the practice field one night, which gives Tipping the first of his many opportunities to exalt in his movie’s signature Concuss-o-Vision, which harkens back to the glory days of “Romeo Must Die” by offering a kind of real-time MRI that allows us to see Cameron’s brain jostle and swell every time he gets hit. His once-assured career already on the rocks now that he isn’t able to show off his skills for the league’s owners, Cameron is suddenly redeemed by the call of calls: Isaiah White — Him himself — has invited him to come train at his super-remote, not-at-all-evil desert compound (played by an active NASA facility in New Mexico). You know, the one that looks like a Bond villain’s secret lair, adorned with ancient symbols, and surrounded by cult-like fans who jump-scare anyone who dares to drive onto the premises. Rest assured that only very normal stuff happens there.
From that point forward, the movie is dedicated to the week-long program that Isaiah cooks up for Cameron in his brutalist football dungeon, with each day growing more sinister than the last. Cameron doesn’t have much of a personality (it must have been one of the sacrifices he made in order to be so good at football), but even a more extroverted prospect would probably default to the same deferential posture that he does at first.
It’s not particularly interesting to watch him murmur some version of “Ohhhkaaayyy…” whenever his host, idol, and mentor gives him a demented pep talk, or injects himself with his old blood, or insists that Cameron strip naked in the middle of the practice facility so that the resident sports doctor (Jim Jefferies) can give him a physical in front of the entire staff, but you can understand why the kid would be willing to chalk them up as the sort of things that happen between episodes of “Hard Knocks.” He’s barely even thrown by a run-in with Isaiah’s influencer wife, who introduces herself by offering the young stud a jade green butt plug (she’s played by an obviously demonic Julia Fox, whose bleached eyebrows and mirrored tops make it all too easy to imagine a Ryan Murphy-directed remake of “Rosemary’s Baby”).
There isn’t a real flag on the play until Isaiah brings in a practice squad to run drills with Cameron, a scene that ends with one of the new guys volunteering to get hit in the face with a perfect spiral from a football throwing machine every time the prospect messes up. The self-annihilation is a bit too “It’s all for you, Damien” to pass the smell test (Cameron never seems to question why Isaiah cares so much about the future of the Saviors franchise, to the point that he’s willing to help the kid who’s threatening to displace him as the team’s starting quarterback), but maybe that’s part of its appeal. People are desperate for something to believe in, especially when they have to forsake everything else before their faith can be rewarded.
That should be a scary prospect for a kid like Cameron, who’s extremely close with his mother and brother, and remains in a ride-or-die relationship with his high school sweetheart despite his newfound fame. But nothing in “Him” is scary, emotionally or otherwise. Tipping is so eager for sizzle and flash that he fumbles any tension or terror out of the face-destroying football drill, which is rendered incoherent by aggressive cuts and hyper-stylized close-ups. Later setpieces similarly try to squeeze genre thrills out of sports culture — precious few of them succeed. A visit to the hyperbaric chamber teases some “Final Destination”-like fun, but nothing comes to pass. A soak in the sauna ends with a mild shock, but the movie is too satisfied with its empty symbolism and routine hagsploitation to feel like it has any skin in the game. Much as Wayans does what he can to will the movie toward some kind of integrity or internal logic, it’s hard to score any points against a broken culture in a movie that can’t think of anything more ominous than the sight of a football rolling down an empty hallway.
At least that last bit is good for a laugh, if only unintentionally. “Him” knows that it’s silly as hell, but it has no idea how to balance that against the ostensible seriousness of its social critique, which is how you wind up with leaden dialogue — “If you were starving to death in jail and offered food or freedom,” Isaiah says to Cameron, “do you really have a choice?” — sandwiched between moments of broad satire in a film where both parts of that equation have been sanded down to the nub. “Him” asks its characters ad nauseam how far they would go to be great, but this dreadfully compromised movie never even risks enough to be good.
Grade: C-
Universal Pictures will release “Him” in theaters on Friday, September 19.
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