After suffering a potentially career-ending brain trauma, Cameron Cade receives a lifeline when his hero, legendary eight-time Championship quarterback and cultural megastar Isaiah White, offers to...
Carmelo Hayes thinks he is HIM? Wait ‘till he gets a load of this film, cause ‘HIM’ takes ‘no guts, no glory’ to such a literal extreme, this Black Mirror episode with advanced CTE dreadfully compromises itself in its own attempts to salvage any semblance of salient cultural critique.
North Dallas Forty, this is not. But hot damn, is it a riot to watch.
At this point, the likelihood of seeing a narrative that specifically dissects a persons spiral into madness in a bid to perfect a passion they believe in with every fiber of their being is very commonplace in the industry, especially in the horror genre. I won’t pretend there isn’t intrigue in picking apart the realities surrounding the league, the pressures athletes face in making the sport ripe for the new breed and the dehumanizing effects that come with it in the corporate age; given how tribal football in general makes its fanbase, I can sort of understand the story treating it as this ancient commodity turned toxic — one that channels the public’s aggression into an almost theatrical form of staged combat while aptly picking apart its obsession with gross bodily harm and racist recruitment practices. Unfortunately, it never trains its gaze on that for long.
There’s only so much to wring out of such a premise with an inane, confused script loaded with racial epithets grated to exasperation without much of a central thesis. It slowly but surely saps enough of the potency out of the character driven proceedings before abruptly morphing into a surreal music video style montage, all of which still treads cliched, well-worn, territory before quickly surrendering itself to post-ironic kitsch in a bid to show off whatever passing fancy it wants. Unlike other sports movies, this one can’t get away with stretching the truth long enough to make suspension of disbelief a necessary evil but since it doesn’t want firm grounding in reality either, all it can do is glance off, obfuscate, dance around to distract you. It knows better than to bore you to death but even when riding the high of its own energy, it stagnates because of how strict its own structure is.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say it was trying to mimic The Substance’s sharpened heightened reality to feel skewered and deliberately distorted….except that films extremism actually bolsters both its worldbuilding and the overarching message it wants to say. This movie is basically madness with no method to help carry it; it’s psychological horror where barely any psychological horror happens.
And for all the heavy-handed pseudo-spiritual finger-wagging it dangles over you like a feather wand, it does such a pitiful job of actively connecting the milquetoast Christian imagery to the fragile dexterity of the actual sport. I mean, I get the similarities and the relevance behind why they placed certain themes here between the conflation of white Christian values and American jingoism but in making its case, it winds up playing to the very appetite for human carnage that fans can’t get enough of; not to mention it also blatantly squanders an opportunity to thoughtfully criticize parents, coaches and athletes who push children over the edge to enforce these kinds of rigorous standards. Every problem this story has boils down to this: it actively punishes you for not buying into the symbolism, yet the squirrelly runtime guarantees the narrative will be too sterile and vanilla to get through without it. For all it’s grandstanding and hotdogging about sacrifices in the world of sports entertainment, nearly every single idea is so half-baked, rushed or unoriginal that even with all it’s ambition, it fundamentally misses the point of how to critique a system while worshipping its results.
The film itself has no idea how the hell it’s supposed to be watched and it’s too diluted by its own self-importance to make a course correct in time to salvage itself.
Ambition is a rocket engine that should take you wherever you wish to arrive and unfortunately for Justin Tipping, he either had no intention on landing or just didn’t have the proper tools to land where he wanted to. I feel so bad for him here; in a day and age where the lines between film and music videos is becoming increasingly blurred, his very direction stretches credulity due to a lack of focus.
Truly, pure style over substance coats these settings and the production design like an amateur painter’s first day on the job and yet, somehow turns out eclectic enough to look impressive. Jordan Ferrer has style to burn, transforming almost every location into a condensed hellish landscape or makeshift Gothic dungeons that feed on the expansiveness (and thus, Isaiah’s implied wealth and power) of the compound and also how remote it is; most of which does get neutered however by how the walls of limitations cave in through stretching the limits of a medium scale production.
For a presentation as thematically confused as this, it feels frivolous to comment on the psychedelic imagery but also quite rude to not give it some flowers; Kira Kelly does stitch together enough arresting compositions to where the mind-numbing strobe effects have some cohesion (because literally anything’s better than Hurry Up Tomorrow). She creates a carefully curated framework that does the job in putting us in the character’s headspace, with poised framing and garish lighting and it helps that there’s already a dense atmosphere in which you are ensconced in to double down on those extremes. Where it loses me is Taylor Joy Mason’s editing; on its best day, the flashy flourishes add to the surreality of the experience and on its worst, it butchers and sputters the momentum the camerawork tries to build.
Pacing is breakneck enough to not drag anything out for longer than necessary (the 81 minute runtime is indicative of such) and despite its tone being sandwiched between sanded-down broad satire and ostentatious seriousness, it eventually catches onto its own silliness. The visual effects with the injury scares and gore are nothing short of spectacular, sound design is visceral in heightening and maximizing subjectivity, Bobby Krlic’s score delves into this overwhelming maximist that inevitably grows distracting with each passing minute, nearly all the “scares” are embarrassing and while it’s not a big win, it fulfill the requirements for an emphatic R-rating.
The cast really try here, making potato salad out of aggressively one-note characters and leaden dialogue exchanges.
Marlon Wayans was always going to be the best part of this movie for me; the shark-eyed intensity, his limber yet off-putting stature, and 0 to 100 mph peacocking makes him unhinged in the best way possible but Julia Fox comes in as a close second, turning a pretty basic character archetype into this witchy first-lady-of-the-manor spectator. Almost everyone else does great with the damning exception of Tyriq Withers himself; he isn’t terrible as the lead as some inklings of quiet charisma ooze out every once in a blue moon but he feels wooden most of the time.
Here is my PSA (Public Service Announcement): it might grow self-aware with how silly it is and adjust “accordingly” but ‘HIM’ is an all aura, barely-any-substance affair that bobbles its own ambition for the most tropeist of basic scares, stagnant drama and muddled potential. For a film I was actually looking forward to heading into the fall, this can’t be anything BUT a disappointment.
