HIM (2025)

In theaters now from Universal Pictures!
Directed by Justin Tipping.
Written by Zack Akers, Skip Bronkie, Justin Tipping.
Check out the trailer here!!

Tyriq Withers plays Cameron Cade who has been groomed since a young age by his football obsessed father to be the next Greatest Of All Time or GOAT in football. Cameron’s childhood hero is Isiah White (Marlon Wayans) and Cameron has patterned his entire life after White to become the next great quarterback for a fictional football team called the Saviors. Things look good for Cameron as he gears up for the NFL draft, but a seemingly out of the blue attack with a crowbar, leaves Cameron in the hospital with a severe concussion and staples in his head leading the press, the coaches, the fans, and Cameron himself to question whether or not his career in football is over before it starts. But good news, Cameron’s agent Tom (Tim Heidecker) has convinced Isaih White himself to invite Cameron to a week long training camp to see if he is cut out to be the next GOAT. But once inside of Isaiah’s facility, Cameron realizes in order to be the best, there must come a lot of hard work and sacrifices. Literal sacrifices. Literally.

Now, I want to begin this review by saying that I actually liked a lot of what HIM had to offer. I think that director Justin Tipping has a creative eye for visually and audibly stimulating scenes. The fast pace of Cameron’s rise to football stardom is communicated well with a whole lot of fast edits, quick cuts, and almost strobe light transitions from one scene to the next in the first half hour. I can understand why this sort of flashy style was used in this way, as the scenes of a football hopeful training to be the best and get drafted has been a sequence that has been done before. Set it to aggressive music, show some blood and x-rays here and there looking at the damage Cameron is accumulating in his body, and maybe even hinting that Cameron doesn’t have all of his wits together in order to make it is a great way of whizzing past familiar scenes and getting to the original stuff. While I imagine those sensitive to strobe effects might have issue with the rapid fire edits, I do think that it is a stylistic choice I can get behind. It reminds me of the style Oliver Syone adopted in both JFK and NATURAL BORN KILLERS. And being a fan of the look of those film, I appreciated it here…for a while.

The problem is that a lot of these quick edits continue throughout the film. This does make for an otherworldly feel for the film, as if Cameron has leapt through the looking glass and Isiah’s football camp is a twisted sporty version of Neverland. There is an alien sense to everything inside of the compound where most of the film resides. Everything is kind of cut together in a slap-dash staccato. And that turns out to be a very difficult way of telling a story. Again, as a stylistic choice, I kind of liked the strobe effect editing. It made me uncomfortable, and that’s a crucial part in an effective horror film.

But the story also has to make sense. HIM feels like there was a lot of writing and rewriting going on and fiddling with plot points while the movie was in production. There are an awful lot of dangling threads hinted at and never addressed. We are told the last time Cameron talked with his father he said he didn’t want to play football anymore. This is a key bit of info about Cameron and his motivation, but it is simply told to us almost as an afterthought way too late in the film. Cameron’s brother seems to be somewhat of a bad influence and there is definitely a lot of jealousy there. Cameron’s girlfriend is protective of him, especially when it comes to temptations involving women. Yet all of these points never come up after introduced at the beginning. I’m not saying they would have made the story better, but why waste space and time on these things in the beginning if they aren’t going to matter for the rest of the movie.

This is Marlon Wayans film though. He gnaws on every scene he’s in. The film does a great job highlighting the complexity of his character. Isaih wants to train Cameron. He says he believes and cares about him. Yet, all the while, there is a bitterness underneath, knowing that this new guy is there to basically replace him. Wayans does a great job of making it seem like he’s being brutal to Cameron because he wants the best out of him. But in reality, he wants to break him and that makes for a very interesting character.

I wish I could say the same for Tyriq Withers. In one sense, he feels like a real small town athlete being thrust into a world where he doesn’t belong or understand. Anyone watching athletes on the news knows they all have this monotone, emotionless way of talking, as if being in front of the camera is not comfortable for them and they would rather just be on the field playing. I get that, but while Withers has that deer in the deadlights look down pat and might have a nice smile, I don’t know if he was up for the heavy drama required for the role. In the end, he is seeing some shit not many people experience and instead of having some kind of reaction of awe, fear, rage, or even confusion, he just kind of has that blank look on his face.

I loved the imagery Justin Tipping used through. From pig masks to killer mascots to x-ray vision of helmets colliding to the various atmospheric tones of Isaih’s rooms. There are symbols and shapes all over the place in HIM, making one want to rewatch just to pick out the little ominous details in the background. Tipping also does a great job of using music and strange sounds to add to that extra-terrestrial feel of Isaih’s place. This is a film with a lot of attention to aesthetics to convey a tone of unease and discomfort. The way he captures the horror of the mascots and specifically, the horrifying fans of football are really well accomplished. Still, there are a lot of metaphors that work, like the metal staples in Cameron’s head resembling a football, showing that football is what is on his mind constantly. But then there are some heavy-handed scenes that I could have done without such as a Last Supper image that came from nowhere.

Then we get the ending, where all of the plot points are supposed to come together and again, this feels like a movie that ended one way and then was tinkered with by the producers in order for it to win over the crowd in the end with a happy ending. Though the film really wanted to fool you into thinking it, HIM is not a Jordan Peele film. That said, it’s ending reminds me a lot of the ending of Jordan Peele’s first film GET OUT. In GET OUT, Daniel Kaluuya as Chris escapes the mansion and the crazy family only to come face to face with the police. The original ending had Chris be arrested by the cops and taken to jail. It feels true to the film, where everywhere is a conspiracy and that conspiracy runs deep and that it runs counter to being a black man in the world GET OUT painted, a world manipulated by white men. It’s that kind of dark TWILIGHT ZONE-style ending that resonates and makes you think. It’s that pitch black ending that Jordan Peele says he loves. But instead, they reshot a crowd-pleaser ending with Chris’ friend inexplicably driving the police car and coincidentally showing up at the exact right time to rescue him. It’s what made GET OUT an ok horror film for me, when up to that point, it felt like something monumental.

HIM has the same kind of ending. During a quiet moment in Cameron’s rigorous training, Cameron tells Isiah how important his family is to him. He lists it in order of importance as Family, God, Football. Isiah disagrees and lists his as Football, Family, God. This is the key difference between Cameron and Isiah and basically the blueprint for the entire film. But that’s not how it works out. Without spoiling too much, Cameron is given a choice and while he doesn’t choose football first, he also puts his family in grave danger by his final actions. Again, the film goes for the crowd-pleasing ending where the lead makes a morally good decision rather than the decision that the whole movie worked up to. The decision that is on the posters. And the decision that would have made this a truly haunting film that says something about the sacrifice these players have to live with every day. The decision that reflects the celebrity secret society conspiracies we are all fascinated with. Instead we get a throwaway ending you’ll forget by the time the credits stop rolling. HIM fumbles the ball in the end. Big time.

And about that ending. I’m just going to address the white elephant in the room, and I know this type of thing gets me in trouble, but it needs to be said. Can we please put a moratorium on African American horror films ending with the lead killing a bunch of white people? It happened in the CANDYMAN remake. It happened in SINNERS. And it happens here in HIM. I get it. Whitey’s bad. But this end not only is divisive in today’s piping hot climate, but it also has become extremely cliché. Especially, when Cameron’s conflict through the whole film was with Isiah, not a gaggle of old white dudes. There I said it. Bash me if you will, but I think there could be a more creative and interesting way to end an African American centric film with a bunch of white people getting kakked. Just sayin’. Just sayin’, Just sayin’.

HIM is a visual feast of a film. It’s nice and gory. It’s aggressive and I can see some high school locker rooms firing up their teams by watching key scenes. It gets the world of football. Marlon Wayons is awesome. Tyriq Withers works in most, but not all of the film.
Jim Jefferies is surprisingly good in a dramatic role and Julia Fox is otherworldly as Isiah’s seductress wife. It gets the brutality of it all and some of those hits had me rocking back in my chair. I just wish HIM had a story with some depth and the ending it worked up to.