American society probably puts more pressure on producing a good quarterback than anything else, which makes it all the more confounding that the Jets can never have one.
OK, OK. So that’s not necessarily the takeaway from “Him,” a new horror thriller about the religious fervor that goes with football. For some of us long-suffering fans, football inspires less Messianic zeal than an annual reminder that this is a dark and cruel world and any delusional preseason hope will be quickly and thoroughly snuffed out.
But Jets fan or not, “Him” has a decent point to make about QB hero worship. These are modern gladiators. But if the issue of some thrillers is that they have nothing to say, the problem with “Him” is that it has exactly one thing to say, which it does again and again and again.
“Him” does have some style, though. Directed by Justin Tipping (“Kicks”) and produced by Jordan Peele, “Him” was made with the potent premise of bringing the kind of dark, satirical perspective that characterizes a Monkeypaw production to our violent national pastime. But that promise gets fumbled in an allegorical chamber play that grows increasingly tedious.
Cameron “Cam” Cade grew up idolizing Saviors quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). As a boy, he watches White win a game on a highlight-reel play that also leaves the QB with a career-threatening injury. “That’s what real men do,” his father (Don Benjamin) tells him. “They make sacrifices.”
Fourteen years later, Cam (Tyriq Withers) is on the cusp of entering the pros as a top draft pick. Just before the combine, though, Cam, while practicing alone at night, is struck in the head by a strange pagan spirit-slash-mascot that emerges out of the shadows. The trauma to the head adds a new risk to Cam’s football playing. But if you’re expecting a horror version of 2015’s “Concussion,” that’s a small part of what “Him” aspires to be about.
The Saviors reach out to Cam’s agent (Tim Heidecker) and offer a unique opportunity: Come to Isaiah’s Texas desert compound to train with him for a week. Isaiah is still in the league and by now, despite the long-ago injury, has gone on to win a Tom Brady-like haul of championships. After a week, the Saviors will decided if they’ll draft Cam.
But what follows over seven days is less a boot camp than a disorienting psychodrama — a kind of football ayahuasca — in which the very intense Isaiah pushes Cam to extremes to test whether he has it in him to be the GOAT. The atmosphere is surreal and the editing hallucinatory. Cam is injected with unknown serums, blood gets transfused and pocket-passing drills turn grisly. This is not a game, Cam is told more than once. To paraphrase Dani Rojas, football is life (and maybe death, too).
By settling the movie into Isaiah’s Brutalist estate, “Him” take what could have been something grander and turns into effectively into a battle for QB1 — albeit one with more primal underpinnings than your average depth-chart contest.
But it’s probably a bad sign for your satire if you have to take reality completely out of it and instead hole up inside a haunted house. There are a few folks around, including Isaiah’s influencer wife (Julia Fox), but somewhere far outside of the frame of “Him” is an enormous football world of arenas, screaming fans and broadcasters — the world that a movie like “Any Given Sunday” rushed to capture, not evade. “Him” ends up feeling like a gladiator movie that forgot the Colosseum.
“Him,” a Universal Pictures release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong bloody violence, language throughout, sexual material, nudity and some drug use. Running time: 96 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.
