Him
Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers (2025's "I Know What You Did Last Summer") has been idolizing San Antonio Saviors quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans) since he was a small child (Austin Pulliam), his father (Don Benjamin) turning the boy's head towards the TV to watch replays of the player's nauseating injury, telling him that 'real men make sacrifices' and 'no guts, no glory.' Fourteen years later, Cam is the sport's biggest prospect when he's attacked from behind with a metal bar to the head. At his lowest point, Cam is amazed when White, who went on to overcome that injury and win eight Superbowl rings, invites him to his compound to train as his protege in "Him."
Laura's Review: D
Cowriter (with TV's 'Limetown' creators Zack Akers & Skip Bronkie)/director Justin Tipping ("Kicks") purportedly wanted to critique football with a body horror film, but instead he's delivered something that is at once obvious and muddled, a film more committed to flashy style than coherence. Considering the massive hype machine behind this Jordan Peele produced project, "Him" is the biggest disappointment of the year.
That opening, White's GOAT status after what appears a career ending injury and the attack on Cam no one seems to investigate (the perpetrator is costumed like a team mascot) is a dead giveaway as to where all this is heading. A doctor tells Cam and his family that another head injury would be career ending and she cannot say it is safe for him to play football. Mom and brother (dad has passed in the interim) seem to waiver while Cam's girlfriend assures him that she loves him whether he plays or not. He attends a game and his agent, Tom (Tim Heidecker), holds a press conference and it's not really clear what is going on. Then, while at a party, Cam gets the news that White has extended an offer that appears to assure him a space in pro ball.
As he's driven to White's brutalist bunker of a residence in the middle of a desert, zealous fans attack his limo, Tom pointing out the particularly disturbing Marjorie. Cam enters a vast space containing oversized portraits of Isaiah and his influencer wife Elsie (Julia Fox) along with a rotating showcase holding an MVP trophy surrounded by White's eight rings. He finds the man in a back room, apparently performing taxidermy on a horse's skull. When Cam asks if he killed the animal, Isaiah smiles and does not answer.
Cam's training regimen is divided into seven chaptered days, the first labelled 'Fun.' Isaiah professes that football is everything, the most important thing in his life, then delivers a history lesson that is an incoherent story about how native American Indians angered bigger white football players with ingenious moves, but when their forward pass idea was legalized, they all became mascots. (Say what? Mascots are clearly meant to symbolize something in this movie, but just what is unclear other than 'not winning'). Cam meets Isaiah's doctor, Marco (Jim Jefferies), who gives him an injection, the first of many, and his wife, who hands him a sex toy on her way out the door to promote same, instructing him to insert it in his butt. As the days pile on, Cam will witness volunteers literally being tortured when he doesn't complete his passes, and be subjected to cringe-inducing bashings of his own as Tipping uses such devices as clunky football helmet POV shots, a type of x-ray cam that reveals internal damage and infrared depictions of his two leads. White asks such questions as 'Would you rather never be tired or never be injured?,' his initial friendliness becoming more and more sinister. During a sauna, Marjorie crawls out from beneath a bench and attacks Cam who very nearly strangles her. Isaiah's reaction is even more disturbing. And if one hasn't cottoned on by now, when Elsie takes Cam to meet the Saviors' team owner at a bizarre party in what appears to be an abandoned strip mall, Tipping's symbolism is quite obvious. The film's climax kicks off the film's complete meltdown - it plays as if the film stock began to burn in the projector.
Marlon Wayans is the best thing in a movie that does him no favors, epitomizing the adage about never meeting your heroes. Withers, a former college wide-receiver, is fine playing few notes, Pulliam evoking more empathy. Fox comes across as a more unhinged Courtney Love crossed with a Daughter of Darkness with bleached eyebrows. Heidecker plays a caricature while Jeffries plays tragedy (and plays it well in a bit of inspired casting). But the film's narrative is a mess, not even clarifying the allegiance of Cam's remaining family.
Universal Pictures releases "Him" in theaters on 9/19/25.
