I am not sure if director-writer Justin Tipping (Kicks) and his co-writers Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie of the blacklisted screenplay, Him were attempting a bold satire on the brutality of football and the game’s cold hearted view towards safety of its players, but certainly the bones of a piercing blow by blow sacking of the sport are there. The problem is Tipping, using lots of quick cuts, booming music cues, flashing xrays of injuries, and voodoo occult-style horror tropes, fails to run up any numbers on the scoreboard.
Him’s marketing campaign suggests something akin to a religious experience with its wannabe star quarterback posing as some sort of Christ-on-the-cross-like figure in the ads with the tag line, “greatness demands sacrifices”. I would add “movies demand coherence”. This one has none, or the satirical bite it demands, and which is probably what attracted Jordan Peele to wanting to produce it and use his name to sell it. After all this is the guy who won an original screenplay Oscar for one of the all-time great horror satires, Get Out. Sorry but I can’t even get in to what the filmmakers were thinking in doing this mishmash of football and fright. And I seriously doubt the NFL will be endorsing it anytime soon.
Plotwise we are introduced to all time great Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans), an 8-time champion star quarterback for the San Antonio Saviors. However he is at a place in his winding-down career where his contract is up and so is his prime, witnessed by a brutal leg injury shown in vivid closeup. But for whatever reason he is ready to turn on a dime and coach his potential successor, the ever-promising Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) who idolized him since he was a kid, and unfortunately has become the victim of a vicious head injury (read: CTE) by some masked halloweeny character who appears out of nowhere to lower the boom during a practice. Career ending? Nope, not if White has his way. He invites Cade to his truly weird compound in the Texas desert where you have to pass through a bunch of zombie-like characters protesting your arrival before you even get to the main event.
It is here that White promises to turn things around for Cade, putting him through a “training” week that gets oh so weird and involves football throwing madness, blood transfusions from “HIM” to “him”, a scary sauna encounter with one of those bizarro creeps outside, and a complete physical totally naked in front of everyone where he gets measured for success as it were. If that is not enough Wayans doing his best Ruth Gordon circa Rosemary’s Baby takes it all to another level. Apparently a deal has been made with the devil, ala Tab Hunter wanting one great baseball season in Damn Yankees.
If only this had the smarts to make all this work as the horror movie it aspires to be, ala Zach Cregger’s Barbarian and Weapons. Mostly Tipping just throws a lot of genre scare tactics that just lay there without impact. Faring best here is Wayans, playing it straight and exhibiting strong authority and a bit of mystery. He’s in another movie. Withers who spends most of time in a state of undress, and sans shirt, certainly has the right physique to be believable as a pro prospect (he was a college player himself), but his role requires physicality and not much else. I was amused by Julia Fox playing White’s influencer wife who has been made up to look like something out of Hocus Pocus, as well as Tim Heidecker’s agressive agent who keeps urging his client to go along with all this strangeness. Also landing some much needed laughs is comic Jim Jeffries as the team doctor.
Producers are Peele, Win Rosenfeld, Ian Cooper, and Jamal Watson
Title: Him
Distributor: Universal
Release Date: September 19, 2025
Director: Justin Tipping
Screenplay: Justin Tipping, Zack Akers, Skip Bronkie
Cast: Marlon Wayans, Tyriq Withers, Julia Fox, Tim Heidecker, Jim Jeffries, Maurice Greene
Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour and 36 minutes
