By Adam Nayman

Copyright thestar

One of the great pleasures of sports fandom — online and in person — is debating the question of which athlete in a particular league is the GOAT: the greatest of all time. The innovation of Justin Tipping’s new football-themed horror movie, “Him” — a contemporary update of the Faust myth set in and around a fictionalized version of the NFL — is to simultaneously literalize and demonize the acronym. Here, the GOAT has actual horns; imagine Baphomet evading a pass rush and you’re within striking distance of the film’s conceptual end zone.

There is, potentially, some satirical juice in the idea of a supernatural gridiron satire, and the fact that “Him” is being presented by Jordan Peele — the reigning master of high-concept genre fare, who’s been using his Monkeypaw production company as an incubator for fresh talent — raises expectations.

But where Peele’s gifts as a filmmaker begin with his elastic mastery of tone, Tipping’s style feels stretched thin from the opening snap. The quick-cut, hallucinatory visuals of the prologue give the game away too fast. For whatever reason, the movie is in hurry to reach its own foregone conclusion, like a prospect trying to beat the clock at a draft-week skills combine.

With his prime-cut physique and fanatical work ethic — a quality instilled in him from childhood by his late father — Cameron “Cam” Cade (Tyriq Withers) is entering his early 20s as a generational quarterback prospect. He’s the projected prize of the draft until an attack by an unknown assailant leaves him concussed, confused and staring down the possibility of a life without football.

Enter Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), a decorated league MVP, who takes an interest in Cam’s fortunes and invites him to try out for his championship squad, the San Antonio Saviors. It’s an offer Cam can’t refuse, and while there are things about the Saviors’ desert-set practice facility that are weird — from the occult-ish iconography dotting the facility to the obsessive, almost cultlike fans camped out on the edges of the property — it seems like a pretty good deal.

Isaiah’s doctors pump Cam full of drugs to speed up his recovery and sculpt his body; his wife, Elsie (Julia Fox), who doubles as the team’s social media guru, works her magic to raise Cam’s public profile. So what if Cam’s been having Satanic panic attacks and Isaiah and his minions seem dangerously crazy? Welcome to the show, kid.

The single best thing “Him” has going for it is Wayans, a marvellous dramatic actor who inadvertently ends up exposing the shallowness of his own role. Ideally, Isaiah would contain multitudes, including some ambivalence about the obvious fact — obvious to everyone but Cam, at least — that he’s grooming his successor. There’s pathos in Wayans’s performance, but the script keeps handing him absurd, distracting, over-the-top shtick — seemingly to kill time, until we realize that said shtick is the texture of the entire enterprise.

There’s a version of this story where the Devil would be in the details — in the way that a culture predicated on the exploitation and endangerment of athletes points toward something urgent and corrosive in American society. But “Him” isn’t really interested in the complexities of its subject, or in taking on the football-industrial complex the way Oliver Stone’s “Any Given Sunday” did.

Instead, it’s interested in the Devil, capital D, and so ends up slipping into the sort of derivative rhythms — ominous foreshadowing, eerie dream sequences, shameless jump scares — that require a real filmmaker’s sensibility to hot-wire and steer somewhere worthwhile. Sadly, Tipping doesn’t work up much momentum, instead cycling through narrative and allegorical clichés with barely any fresh or arresting images to show for it.

The climax in particular is a letdown: a veritable smorgasbord of gore that nevertheless feels drained and bloodless. There was never much chance of a movie like “Him” being the GOAT, but it doesn’t have the courage or conviction (or vision) to skirt worst-of-all-time territory either. It’s a movie to forget.