“Him” is a helmet-to-helmet collision of a movie
Directed by Justin Tipping
Written by Skip Bronkie, Zack Akers, and Justin Tipping
Starring Marlon Wayans, Tyriq Withers, Julia Fox, Tim Heidecker, and Jim Jeffries
What happened here?
The question isn’t rhetorical, though it’s unlikely we’ll ever get a straight answer. It’s also not the basic “What happened here?” that might accompany any bad movie. Rather, watching Him, you’re left with the sense that you’re seeing something unfinished. Something happened to it, whether a run down clock or a cataclysmic lack of vision. Given the symbolism packed throughout the film—stitches on a skull matching the stitching on a football, a fight song sung over a wounded teammate—the former seems more probable. Say what you will about the Justin Tipping’s (Kicks) direction, but Him plays like a film with vision. It was just a vision of creepy sports imagery strung together by only the vaguest semblance of a plot. Its best case scenario was as one the slew of mediocre “elevated horror” flicks released each year. In its seemingly incomplete state, it falls short of even that, a true disaster.
As the story opens, Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers, I Know What You Did Last Summer) is a faithful fan of the non-copyright infringing football team, the San Antonio Saviors. His house is filled with Catholic memorabilia, but it’s clear that the thing his family truly worships is the team. “That’s what real men do: they make sacrifices” he’s told by his father when his idol, Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans, Air), receives a potentially career-ending injury. It’s the first of many times the movie drops the word “sacrifice” in the vain hope that repeating it often enough will turn it into a theme. Years later, after a montage of truly horrendous fake archival footage guides us through White’s post-injury renaissance and Cam’s meteoric rise, the two men finally meet Cam after an injury of his own and Isaiah at the end of his career, looking for his replacement. “What are you willing to sacrifice?” he asks Cam as he takes him under his wing.
This is where Him most wants to plant its flag, the idea that professional football players are expected to sacrifice their physical wellbeing for a shot at being great, and in doing so, become a sacrifice themselves for a nation’s near-religious zealotry for the sport. To become the GOAT, Him argues with middle school wordplay, you yourself become a sacrificial goat on an altar, and if impressing that idea upon you means characters have to repeat the word “GOAT” ad nauseum in contexts no one would never use it, then that’s just the sacrifice you, the audience, must make. How else is a writer meant to communicate a theme? Through the story?
And that’s where Him falls apart: not in its lack of subtlety, but in an inability to convey information through cinematic means. Nowhere is this clearer than the editing, with scenes that peter out with no resolution and montages that communicate nothing yet seem to skip over important events. Cam arrives at Isaiah’s lavish bunker. One montage later, they’re acting chummy despite the montage containing mostly generic shots of Withers throwing a football. Later, Cam goes to a party. One montage later, a character has been butchered for no discernible reason and another seems to stab Cam, only for him to turn up in the next scene with no stab wound and a vendetta against an entirely different character. They have the form of a montage, but not the function. Time is compressed; nothing is conveyed.
Much of Him plays as hallucinatory, such as when Cam enters a hyperbaric chamber and immediately loses his mind, that it’s impossible to tell if what we’re seeing is mere tone-setting. This is why it’s easy to imagine you’re watching an unfinished product. Entire sequences, important sequences, are missing, replaced with pseudo-stylized montages of flashing lights in a lame attempt at papering over the holes. It’s not ambiguity as an artistic statement; it’s ambiguity borne of script pages that didn’t get shot. For further evidence, see comedian Jim Jeffries’s performance, which seems to be eighty percent dubbing by volume, the actor usually facing away from the camera or relegated to the background of a shot while speaking to better hide that his mouth doesn’t match the words he’s speaking.
Elsewhere, Wayans does well enough as the slightly-off mentor but entirely fails to sell the transition to horror movie villain, so broad in his unmotivated mood swings that he completely lacks impact. He cackles. He cries. He screams in Cam’s face then boops his nose. His instinct is for whatever would be craziest in the moment rather than what would make for a compelling character. Without that grounding, Wayans is doomed to number only as one of the dozen actors who go meaninglessly full-bore any given year. However, fed laughable self-serious dialogue like “You know the saying ‘God, Family, Football?’ For me, it’s ‘Football, Family…God’” or the follow-up “Football, Family, God? I am football!” it’s hard to blame him for failing to come away from the script with a concrete idea of his role. In the lead, Withers is so devoid of interiority that he hardly bears mentioning, but one imagines that he too is hard done by the missing scenes.
Lacking a foundation, the film collapses the instant it enters its third act. It’s a thing to behold. Dialogue decouples from even half-established themes. Characters act without any sensible motivation. Tipping abuses the jitter effect to try and lend some gravitas to what still plays as a dull-as-dirt punch-up. It only gets worse as it goes on—layering on more hackneyed ideas, more ill-defined Faustian bargains, more random bouts of exploitative violence and black comedy—until it becomes greetable only with eyerolls and wishful glances at the theater exit. By the end, even individual lines of dialogue have stopped making sense. “Do you know what the opposite of a savior is?” one character intones, “A mascot.” It’s the rare cinematic failure in basic language comprehension. No, a mascot is not the opposite of a savior. What are you even talking about? What happened here?
Rating: D
Him is now playing in theaters. You can watch the trailer here.
