No, Him is not Jordan Peele’s latest outing, though it is totally understandable why some of the marketing seemed to imply that. Peele’s name carries weight, and if he’s willing to attach himself to a relatively new director in the form of Justin Tipping, that means something. Was Peele right this time? Sort of. It certainly doesn’t carry the quality of his own films, but Tipping positions himself as someone to watch in this industry with his bloody football allegory.
Him Review
Him has a lot going for it. It’s not subtle whatsoever in its imagery, metaphor, or message. It’s going to hit you hard, like a linebacker making a hit on a crossing route. It’s meant to leave you dazed and hurting and perhaps questioning why you’re here in the first place. This game we love so much, football, is brutal and violent, and it takes a serious toll on its players.
That is the core message of the movie. Justin Tipping seems to be a little fed up with football as a sport, crafting a movie around the central idea that the sport has some irreparable problems. This idea that football takes far too much, much more than any other sport, from its players is the through line that ties in some religious themes, toxic masculinity, and more.
We learn that Cameron Cade, the star quarterback heralded as the next “GOAT” in football, was heavily influenced by a potentially abusive father that real men play football and real men make personal sacrifices at great cost to themselves and little gain. It’s not the biggest part of the movie, but this “next GOAT” search is another scathing indictment of sports culture.
We’ve been looking for the next LeBron James for at least a decade. We looked for the next Tom Brady while he was still in the league, and when Patrick Mahomes seemed to be that, we began looking for the next Mahomes, all while both of them were still playing. It’s an incessant need to be the greatest ever and to find the greatest ever, when it should be satisfactory just to be good. Not everyone can be the best; that’s why it’s called that.
It comes off in the film a little ridiculous. This is a college quarterback who has skyrocketed up draft boards after being a walk-on player, which, with all due respect, is not exactly GOAT material. This, and the generally insane use of that term and the fact that all this is being placed on a college kid, may be an oversight, an example of the writers not knowing the intricacies of the sport. But it also serves as an over-the-top way of illustrating just how ridiculous it all is.
Religious Imagery
Him uses a ton of religious imagery. God and religion are front and center with football, portraying the way American football in particular develops a cult-like following. Fans who only watch football, which is totally well and good, would swear it’s the only sport worth watching, and the months (necessary time for players to heal and recover, I might add) it’s not active are seen as painstaking and just plain awful.
The religious iconography is flowing heavily here, sometimes too much. There’s a brief recreation of the Last Supper, and there’s references to powerful blood and a ton of things relevant to the Christian faith. It might seem like an indictment of that world, but it’s really just using faith and the devout nature of it as a way to shine light on how crazed we can all get.
But on the flip side, the entire movie hinges on a Faustian bargain. I won’t go into heavy spoilers, but there’s definitely some actual cult activity going on here. It’s not purely a metaphor. On that note, I would even wager to say that the movie makes clear how bad the cult-like aspects are, which isn’t a criticism of Christianity but somewhat of a rebuke of the opposite.
Toxic Masculinity
One of the other big themes here is the nagative impact of toxic masculinity. It’s made very clear with the opening scene that Cade’s father didn’t see him as anything more than a football player. He’s very young when football legend Isaiah White suffers a brutal, Kevin Ware-like injury (the bone is sticking out after a broken leg).
Understandably, the young Cade doesn’t want to look at that. That’s his idol suffering a gruesome injury, so he looks away at the poster on the wall. His father forces him to watch and we learn that he made his son rewatch the injury over and over again, positing that White is a “real man” and pushing Cade to be a football player, and a legendary one, at all costs.
That’s where White comes in, becoming a psuedo father of sorts and picking up that same role. He wants to push Cade to be great so that he can maybe take over the QB1 job of the San Antonio Saviors (there goes that heavy-handed symbolism again). There’s a real attempt at painting these things in a negative light.
There’s also some exploration of the obsession and sometimes dangerous level of investment into this. All sports take a major toll on players, but football more than others. Concussions are just part of it, so players have to be willing to sacrifice their future brain health to play this game.
And to be legendary, they have to sacrifice pretty much everything, including their family (ask Tom Brady about that). Every character even remotely involved in the team and the careers of Cade and White have sacrificed virtually everything they have, and it’s very clear that that’s not healthy for anyone.
It’s not doing a great job of that, but the effort was made. In fact, it’s not doing a great job with any of the metaphors and themes presented. There are good, worthy ideas being put on display, but they’re only explored so much.
There’s a major condemnation of toxic masculinity and how it really does hurt men, and this is very evident in football. But it doesn’t go too much deeper than that. The religious aspects are also reduced most often to imagery and not deep metaphor. That imagery is not off-base, and it’s all in service of fair and accurate criticisms, but it is not even remotely subtle. You can’t possibly miss the metaphor here.
Solid Work from a Solid Cast
The acting here is solid. Tyriq Withers is doing good work, becoming a name to watch, but Marlon Wayans is putting in really good work. The role allows him to be funny, which has always been his strength, while also allowing for a deeper and more ranged performance. It’s great work from him, and the supporting cast is pretty small but solid as well.
Wayans provides most of the humor, and the movie is actually lot funnier than you’d expect. Aside from the brutal and bloody nature of this movie, it’s not all that scary, and it works more as a dark comedy than a true horror film. But the blood makes up for the lack of horror in spades. “This game rewards violence,” White tells Cade, and the movie does not shy away from that idea.
Unfortunately, it can lean into that too much at times, especially in the third act. Through the first two-thirds of the movie, there’s been some solid groundwork laid for all the metaphors at play, but it really goes off the rails, leaning into the violence and religious symbolism at the cost of the story it’s trying to tell. It gets really wild, and not in a good way.
There’s even a moment in the resolution that could’ve made it all worth the struggle, but it misses the mark there, too. Cade didn’t have much of a choice in his situation once things got fully played out, but had he made the opposite choice, it would have been a more fitting ending, and it would have reinforced the movie’s central message even more.
By essentially opting for the happy ending here, Tipping and company have undermined their message a little bit. And at the same time, those “sacrifices” that were so prevalent are made in a different, less satisfying way since Cade still has to sacrifice the good person he’s been in order to get the desired result. It just opts to lean into the blood and gore for an explosive end rather than something that fits thematically.
The movie has been criticized for being style and no substance. The movie is dripping in style, which is why Tipping is a name to watch out for. The imagery is visceral and uncomfortable, but it’s meant to be. It’s bloody and really well-shot, all things that are clearly Tipping’s strenghts.
And while it’s certainly not lacking substance at all, it is pretty thin. It has some things to say, even if they’re not totally clear and if they’re not telegraphed as effectively as they could be. So it is style more so than substance, but I’m not willing to let the effort to provide some real subtext and thematic messaging go completely unnoticed.
The atmosphere is strong, and the tension is increased ever so slightly. The film’s structure works at first, but it begins to struggle under its own weight towards the end. It’s broken up into days, but it would’ve made more sense just to have the movie flow from piece to piece rather than noting the passage of time that would’ve been clear anyway and slapping a thematic label on the scene.
Conclusion
Him is not as deep as it could be, but it’s also not as shallow as some people say. The criticims it levies against football and sports culture are valid, although the message and the messenger might hurt the spread of this idea. It’s also not as if the biggest sport in the country is going to take any criticisms from a movie and learn and grow, but it’s a worthy attempt at illustrating the fault in some of this.
Score: 3.25/5
