RIOTUS

I was very excited about the concept of the film Him, the new film by director Justin Tipping and produced by Jordan Peele, with the marketing using Peele’s name even more so than the film’s stars, Marlon Wayans and Tyriq Withers, to draw audiences. It’s all in the game, so it didn’t change my desire to see the film. I have a pretty conflicted view of the game of football and the NFL. I was never a fan of college sports. As a child, I thought they ain’t pros so why watch amateurs then, as I grew up, I am more bothered by how much work these kids do and some others make so many billions of dollars off their dreams, but that’s an entirely different conversation. I stopped watching the NFL after the concussion story started gaining traction in the late 2000s and early 2010s, as I feel the league makes too much money not to have a way to deal with the problem and take care of the players.

So seeing a psychological horror film about football did seem interesting to me. The setup is this: Marlon Wayans plays Isaiah White, quarterback for the USFF (the fake league in the film) team, the San Antonio Saviors, who is considered the best player of all time, leading his team to eight championships, after twenty years of being asked about retirement. At the same time, Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers), the best college player coming into the Draft, is already being talked about as being the next GOAT, surpassing even White in his future. After an attack leaves Cade unable to complete the Draft Combine, he gets an offer to spend a week with White at his house for a special training session that could lead to him being drafted by the Saviors and working with and taking over for his idol, Isaiah White.

Alright, so cool pretty simple. You can already see how they can get some good stuff out of this. We have two generations battling over who will be the man. One not wanting to be replaced, one trying to secure his future and live up to potential. Plays right into the idea of never meeting your heroes. The film starts strong here with how the confluence of sports media, race, and capitalism all start mixing into a torturous gumbo of exploitation through competition, as well as having a person’s worth be tied to a game that is, in the end, entertainment. Here, Cam has so much pressure on him based on his potential and all the work he put in to get to this point. The film has his father dying before seeing him making it to this point, adding even more weight to his every decision that Withers plays perfectly.

The early parts of the film where we see Withers’ Cam enter this sparse, brutalist home that Wayans’ White lives in. It’s a blank maze, and the deeper he goes with his training, the more and more confusing and dark it becomes. It works well with the story Tipping is telling. Wayans and Withers also visually bring to mind a lot of the conversation about the idea of the Black quarterback, especially currently. With Withers being so much lighter than Wayans, the film plays with the nature of colorism and the potential of a player in the position. With so much of the history of the quarterback mainly being white male players with a lot of made-up reasons for their being superior at the position, a lot of that has transformed as other positions have fallen by the wayside in prominence, and a more athletic quarterback has risen up.

That’s where the colorism comes into play. The most glaring example is Patrick Maholmes being the perfect mix of the athletic Black player and the more “intelligent” white player in the way you can read the way they talk about him. I feel Withers’ Cam has a connection with that. The comments about his look and assumptions about his background are telling. I like the way the film uses the Goat motif early on in the film, and the dangling of such success and fame with sacrifice for this game of football. It’s here where the film plays with the selling of one’s soul to the devil, with the blatant connection of the Goat, a symbol of the devil, and the concept of the G.O.A.T. It doesn’t completely work if you know the etymology of the term and its connection to other sports and public figures, but no need to get too deep. It’s this connection to the supernatural that really starts to pull the film apart by the end, though, and something I kind of wish they had just left to subtly.

Tipping has some fantastic visuals in this film, using X-rays to show the damage in the body during the play of football. It’s visually striking and reminds me of the X-ray moves in the modern Mortal Kombat games. The film’s carefully curated visuals, along with pacing, include some solid jump scares at times throughout. And yet, as the film goes to its climax and resolution, the point of it all falls apart, and it relies on visuals and the strong performances of the two leads to carry it on through to the endzone, and it fumbles on the twenty-yard line. Julia Fox is in this film as Elsie White, Isaiah’s wife, who’s also an influencer. I feel she’s supposed to be a Kim Kardashian-like figure, but mostly her character and performance drag the film down, and when its importance grows in the plot, it makes the film more confusing.

I wish the character were a background one at best, and it would’ve worked better in what the film was talking about. For me, you don’t need a bunch of the more supernatural parts of this film, and mixing in a connection to the colosseum, Rome, and the Greek/Roman gods. Like, I get how you can connect it to how we see billionaire capitalists and the relationship between the athletes, the owners, and the fans. It’s something that’s been made before, and the film was already doing a great job of that, and I feel, while cathartic, it made the ending, it made it ultimately for me, made the whole thing fall apart like a house of cards. I’ll watch the first hour of this movie again easily, but I can skip that last thirty minutes or so. Him was a film I was down to love, and when it started, I was really into it, but as it went on, it just lost points. It continued even with such strong visual filmmaking and outstanding performances. In the end, the film just couldn’t get it done and finish strong. It’s probably worth waiting for it at home in the end.