Histrionically Violent HIM Fails to Score
I find that I admired HIM for what I felt it was attempting to do more than I enjoyed the actual watching of it. Director and co-writer Justin Tipping (Kicks) certainly goes for broke with his metaphorical horror yarn, layering the social commentary inside a sports-centered tale of ambition, faith, race, gender, family, and bodily autonomy with all the subtlety of a linebacker slamming facemask-first into the chest of a blindsided quarterback. His film hits first, hits hard, and hits again when the viewer is already curled up into a ball attempting to protect themselves. Pity, then, that it has so little of interest to say.
Expected to go number one in the upcoming professional draft, college quarterback Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) is viciously attacked by a deranged fan and left with a massive scar carved into his skull. His career potentially over before it has even begun, the young phenom is gifted the opportunity of a lifetime: to join eight-time world champion Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans) in seclusion for a week of intense training. It will be seven long days of sweat and sacrifice Cade won’t soon forget — assuming he survives.
Tipping and fellow writers Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie immediately lay their cards all on the table. Our first images of White are to see him through Cade’s adolescent eyes as he watches his favorite player win his first championship, suffering a gruesome injury on the game-winning play. As he tries to turn away from the television, his father forces his head back to the screen. He tells his son that if he ever hopes to be considered the greatest of all time, if he wants to be the proverbial “him,” Cade must be willing to lay everything on the line — even his own life — to achieve victory.
It’s clear that something far beyond your normal sports medicine science is at play from that point forward. Not only does White make a miraculous recovery, but he also proceeds to have a career unlike any other quarterback in the history of the game. His skills border on superhuman, so it’s no shock that when Cade arrives at his idol’s private training compound that there’s something ominous about the facility, White’s methods to stay in tiptop shape, and what he’s willing to do to maintain his competitive edge sharp.
Pagan imagery abounds, including misshapen husks with goat antlers sprouting from the side of their deformed heads. The lighting inside White’s compound never seems to be coming from a consistent place of origin. The interiors of the living sections wind around like the underground tunnels of a military bunker, and while all the equipment is sleek and modern, White, his image-conscious wife, Elsie (an unrecognizable Julia Fox, who is outstanding), and their drone-like staff utilize it all as if they were devoted disciples of the Spanish Inquisition.
For a while, all of this had me fascinated. Withers, a former college football wide receiver now on the cusp of a promising acting career (he also makes a memorable impression in the I Know What You Did Last Summer requel), is quite good as the befuddled Cade, and Wayans takes maniacal glee in making White a demonic whirligig who proudly puts football above everything else in his life, including his own family. Production and costume designers Jordan Ferrer and Dominique Dawson help Tipping achieve an otherworldly visual aesthetic that’s unnerving, while composer The Haxan Cloak, aka Bobby Krlic, crafts an insidiously eerie score that happily made my skin crawl.
The problem is, as everything moves forward and the situations become increasingly absurd (not to mention violently extreme), whatever thematic points Tipping and company are trying to make are frustratingly lost amidst blood-soaked carnage. There’s not a lot of character development, and a supposedly shocking third-act revelation hits more with a shoulder-shrugging thud than it does with anything moderately substantive. While the practical makeup and gore effects are impressive, they also don’t add up to much. It’s like the whole enterprise is more like an idea for a student short film that’s for some reason been stretched out to feature-length, and any lasting impact it may have is marginal at best.
For my part, I think the most vexing aspect is that I think I get what Tipping was going for. There’s a solid discussion bubbling underneath the surface concerning masculinity, race, wealth, and religion, but because the director seems so infatuated with crafting an ethereal visual spectacle, it all gets lost amidst all the psychedelic abnormality.
By the time events devolved away from football and straight into gladiatorial chaos, I kind of stopped caring about whether or not Cade was going to figure out what was going on and what his part in all of the strangeness was supposed to be. None of that stuff mattered anymore. For all its volcanic outbursts and aggressive proclamations of overwhelming victory, HIM fails to score.
Film Rating: 2 (out of 4)
