HIM may have a few messy possessions, but it’s a sports thriller that dares to tackle the brutal physical and psychological toll athletes place on themselves in pursuit of greatness.
Marlon Wayans is Isaiah in HIM, directed by Justin Tipping.
Directed by Justin Tipping from a Black List script by Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie, and produced by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions, the film isn’t just about football. It’s about obsession, identity, and what happens when the dream of immortality curdles into a nightmare.
The opening prologue takes us to a nationally televised football championship where San Antonio Saviors quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans) is on the verge of cementing his legacy as one of the greatest of all time. Record-breaking stats flash across the screen, the crowd roars his name, and at home a young boy with NFL dreams watches alongside his family. But when Isaiah suffers a catastrophic leg injury, Cameron’s father seizes the moment to teach his son about the meaning of sacrifice and dedication. It’s a mentality Cameron carries with him into his final hours before the scouting combine.
Now older, Cameron (Tyriq Withers), a rising quarterback whose path to the NFL is violently derailed after an attack by a crazed fan leaves him with a traumatic brain injury. One of which leaves staples in his head and forced rest under his doctor’s orders. When his idol, legendary quarterback Isaiah, offers to train him for a week at an isolated desert compound, it feels like second chance. But mentorship quickly blurs into manipulation. Cameron is forced to give up his phone and loses nearly all access to the outside world. Cut off from society, he begins to witness strange events around the compound and unsettling behavior from Isaiah and his inner circle.
As Isaiah’s charisma twists into something far more sinister, Cameron must decide how much he’s willing to sacrifice—and whether greatness is worth losing himself entirely.
What begins as a redemption arc quickly spirals into a rabbit hole where legacy, sacrifice, and control collide, only to collapse into an incoherent mishmash of half-baked ideas and underdeveloped concepts. The story unfolds across a brisk one-hour-and-36-minute runtime, structured around a seven-day training program. Each day is meant to spotlight a different aspect of the professional athlete’s life—fun, resilience, dedication, sacrifice, and more. On paper, it’s a compelling framework. In practice, though, the film feels rushed, tossing out themes it never fully explores and sprinting toward the next day or the next grotesque visual. The ambition is undeniable, but the execution and the cold character work makes it hard to get fully invested.
Cameron soon becomes a witness to Isaiah’s unraveling. At the same time, we aren’t given so much as a reason to care because he can’t even be bothered to question what’s happening before him or try to get out. Instead he stays at the compound surrendering himself deeper to Isaiah’s every word. Between injections, blood doping, and skeletal “adjustments” from a sadistic chiropractor, it’s a wonder anyone sticks around the compound. But Cameron has everything to lose if he leaves—his shot at the league, the chance to provide for his family, and living up to his late father’s expectations. And yet, with the violence he’s about to witness, those motivations feel flimsy. I
In place of the inspirational locker-room speeches you’d expect from a typical sports movie, Isaiah recruits a rotating cast of “free agents” to motivate his protégé. The methods are anything but uplifting. For every failed pass, a player is punished by standing in front of a passing machine and taking the ball square to the face. It’s grotesque, absurd, and gruesomely effective—faces turning to hamburger meat as proof that pain is the price of greatness. Other times, Cameron hits another free agent so hard, he could be paralyzed. And yet, no one offers help or aid, instead they gather around his body and chance as as if a player spiked a ball after scoring a touchdown. It becomes clear that Tippin wants the audience to feel uncomfortable.
HIM is at its best when Withers and Wayans share the frame. Most of their time together plays like an escalating pissing contest—who’s the bigger man on campus—punctuated by chest-thumping, screaming matches, and victory dances over a teammate so severely injured he may be paralyzed. We never find out, because the film doesn’t follow through with some mysteries but finds ways to add new ones that won’t receive any closure.
There are flashes, though, where it feels like HIM might actually be going somewhere. A trip to the shooting range has Isaiah wager that if Cameron misses his shot, he’ll “take his youth.” Given Isaiah’s enduring legacy despite injuries and the trail of discarded prodigies who came before, the moment hints at something vampiric—Isaiah as a legend literally feeding on the youth of draft hopefuls to preserve his own greatness. Again, since the film leans heavily on the notion that players are only as good as their bodies allow them to be this could have been the film’s sharpest metaphor.
But moments like that are rare. More often than not, HIM undercuts its own ideas with half-baked execution, clumsy symbolism, and a frustrating lack of follow-through. Justin Tipping clearly wants to swing for the fences, blending body horror, satire, and sports melodrama, but the end result feels more like a flag on the play than a touchdown.
Wayans commits to the bit, hamming it up so hard at times that it borders on parody, while Withers sells the physicality and pain of a quarterback pushed to the brink. The problem is everything around them is scattershot, with ideas thrown at the screen faster than you can process them. By the time it ends, HIM feels less like a bold new take on the sports thriller and more like a jumble of interesting concepts left stranded on the field.
5/10
