Ever since he was a little boy, Cameron Cade wanted to be the quarterback of the San Antonio Saviors. He remembers him and his dad watching the Super Bowl back in the day, when their star quarterback, Isiah White (Marlon Wayans), led the team to a last-minute victory before sustaining what appeared to be a career-ending leg injury. Miraculously, White didn’t just bounce back — he ended up leading the team to eight more wins over the next 14 years, creating a dynasty for the Lone Star team. You can keep your Bradys and your Mannings, your Bradshaws and your Mahomes. In Cameron’s eyes, White was and is the all-out GOAT. No one else comes close.
The news that the legend is considering retirement is a mixed blessing in the Cade household, because it signals both the end of an era for the franchise and the beginning of a new one. Specifically, it means that now-grown Cameron (Tyriq Withers), who’s become the hottest collegiate QB in a generation, is being touted as the Saviors’ next messiah. Having returned home before the upcoming draft picks, Cade is throwing the ball around on his old high school field after hours when he’s attacked by a mysterious stranger in a mascot outfit. The assault keeps him out of the combine and more or less kills his momentum. Goodbye, potential NFL glory days.
Then Cade’s agent (Tim Heidecker) calls him with incredible news: No less than White himself has been watching the young man with the cannon-like arm over the years. He wants Cade to come to his compound in the middle of the desert and train with him for five days, to see if the kid has what it takes to be the heir to the throne. If he and the team’s owners like what they see at the end of the week, Cade may still have a chance of becoming a Savior. He just has to survive what we’ll characterize as an extremely aggressive, very unique, and possibly sinister regiment of exercises and drills — some might even call them “rituals” — designed to test his mettle.
That’s the basis of HIM — as in, the ESPN-friendly soundbite boast “I’m him” — and maybe it’s best if we start with the stats in this film’s favor. Let’s go to the highlight reel: It’s produced by Jordan Peele‘s Monkeypaw Productions, an auteur-run production shingle that guarantees a certain amount of social-thriller bona fides and smarts. The thing has style to burn, courtesy of director Justin Tipping (Kicks), and cinematographer Kira Kelly. The production design team turns White’s state-of-the-art fortress of solitude, complete with in-house gridiron, spa, and a look that melds Southwestern chic decor with Gothic waking nightmare, into a gorgeous version of hell. A former Division 1 athlete (he was a wide receiver for the Florida State Seminoles), Withers easily convinces you that he could be a major prospect for league scouts and generate chatter among armchair sports pundits. You want eerie scenes that cross the line between scrimmage and carnage, and are also filmed in x-ray vision? Done. How about a seriously batshit Julia Fox, leaning heavily into a witchy first-lady-of-the-manor character that has her own line of jade yoni eggs? Done times 100.
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It’s also got Marlon Wayans in beast mode, lending an air of menace and megalomania to White that helps sell an otherwise stock bad-mentor character. He’s Cade’s father figure one second, his tormentor the next, and not so eager to pass the torch or give up the crown as one might think. It’s a role that calls for a lot of 0-to-60 mph screaming, flexing (literally and metaphorically), peacocking, and platitude-reciting; the script by Tipping, Zack Ackers and Skip Bronkie loves a no-pain-no-gain sports maxim not wisely but too well, but at least Wayans knows how to lace with toxic irony as things get more unhinged. If you’ve seen his past few stand-up specials, then you know the comic is in the middle of a seriously fertile creative run, and you feel like he’s brought some of that juice over to his take on an apex predator toying with his prey.
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HIM ultimately takes all of these elements and throws them rapidly downfield at what feels like the most unfocused attempt at a socially resonant, allegory-heavy genre movie in ages. Anyone who thinks that the notion of a sports league centered around the financial exploitation of Black athletes and physical exploitation of Black bodies for gladiatorial entertainment, all overseen by rich, white team owners, would make for a compelling horror film will find that there’s a serious gap between conception and execution here. (The answer, of course, is: Yes, it would make a compelling horror film, and we hope someone makes said film one day.) The one-to-one comparison between today’s pro sports and yesteryear’s slave trade is made explicit several times, as is the idea that team fandom and cult worship is just one maniacally drooling, face-painted cosplayer away from being the same thing; should you miss the point, a character will outright say, “His fan club is like a cult.” Noted!
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It doesn’t help that, while the movie barrages audiences with impressively surreal sequences, the sense that the story is simply there to service such show-offy filmmaking flourishes — as opposed to the other way around — only builds as things dip into the supernatural. We stan a creepy image as much as the next person! Possibly more than the next person, in fact! But simply stringing a bunch of them together and hoping a cumulative nightmare logic will sell a social-thriller concept that hasn’t been thought through doesn’t quite cut it. The big climactic set piece is somehow both maddeningly ambiguous and head-smackingly obvious, a maximalist attempt at making a statement that talks loud and says nothing. HIM is full of such fourth-down fumbles. At one point, a character is forced to stand in front of an automatic football launcher and take a series of pigskins to the cranium, each of which is shot at him with increasing speed. And by the end of this mess, you’re left thinking: I now know exactly how that guy felt.