Cast: Marlon Wayans, Tyriq Withers, Julia Fox, Tim Heidecker, Jim Jefferies
Genre: Horror, Sport
Director: Justin Tipping
In Irish Cinemas: 3rd October 2025
Marlon Wayans mugs his way through the role of a legendary quarterback desperate to anoint a successor, in a satire that mistakes blunt-force allegory for critique and ultimately drowns in its own excess.
Him—a Jordan Peele–produced gore fest in the psychological register of Us—tries to rip apart the formulaic sports narrative that has lingered in American cinema since Chaplin’s The Champion. This time, football isn’t the metaphorical field of dreams; it’s an industrial grinder. The victim is Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers), a generational talent branded as the heir to Wayans’s Isaiah White, a Tom Brady stand-in. But when a surreal, skull-rattling concussion jeopardizes Cameron’s golden-ticket payday, he retreats to Isaiah’s desert fortress for rehabilitation—an unholy training compound riddled with temptation and menace, where salvation feels impossible.
Subtlety is not Him’s playbook. It begins with Isaiah snapping his leg on a championship drive, while a young Cameron watches from home as his father drills the credo “no guts, no glory” into him like scripture. From there, football is reframed as a cattle market where players are bought, prodded, and broken for consumption. Director Justin Tipping peppers the film with flourishes—X-ray cutaways that expose shattered bones and concussed brains—but spectacle quickly overwhelms substance.
And here’s the problem: disbelief is harder to suspend in football than in, say, Formula 1 dramas. The sport’s mythology is too ingrained, its hierarchies too familiar. Audiences know quarterbacks sit atop the pyramid, cushioned from the grind that linemen and fringe players endure. So the conceit that a prospect of Cameron’s caliber would face the same meat-grinder hurdles as a backup receiver rings false. Equally far-fetched is the sight of Wayans, age 53, playing an aging superstar still relevant enough to bankroll a desert compound—a fantasy even Major League Baseball’s guaranteed contracts rarely afford.
The narrative doubles down on outdated tropes. Cameron’s supposed “prove-it” moment comes at the scouting combine, a showcase elite QBs routinely skip. His body becomes an obsession, despite the fact that modern-day greats thrive with “dad bods”—Tom Brady’s infamous shirtless combine photo is still a punchline decades later. Meanwhile, Isaiah is awkwardly recast as mentor, a role no aging QB clinging to a roster spot would ever embrace. Any Given Sunday nailed this dynamic 25 years ago; Him stumbles.
Without that grounding in reality, the film devolves into kabuki theater masquerading as critique. Which is a shame, because buried beneath the melodrama are provocative ideas about football’s entanglement with American faith and nationalism. In real locker rooms, players are taught to arrange life in a hierarchy—God, family, football. In Him, Isaiah flips the order, insisting, “He died for us so I play for Him.” His team is literally called the Saviors, and Cameron’s childhood shrine to Isaiah resembles a chapel.
Tipping and his co-writers sharpen this blasphemous streak with imagery that conflates sports fandom, Christianity, and the occult. Blood sacrifices, inverted crosses, even a Last Supper tableau with Cameron seated in Jesus’s place. One can easily picture devout football fans—ostensibly the movie’s demographic—bristling at the desecration.
The film’s saving graces arrive from the margins. Tim Heidecker and Jim Jefferies bring wit and acidity as Cameron’s agent and Isaiah’s doctor. Julia Fox, as Isaiah’s wife, is unexpectedly magnetic. But their energy can’t counterbalance Wayans’s overindulgence or the narrative’s flimsy logic. The result is a film that promises an indictment of America’s most violent pastime, yet ends up reveling in the same spectacle it claims to despise.
Whether approached as a slasher flick or a sports parable, Him doesn’t score. It fumbles.
Overall: 5.5/10
Movie Reviewer
