HIM - Mark Reviews Movies

Him, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 18, 2025

A solid premise and few vague ideas aren't enough for a movie. Him has a very intriguing setup, in which a soon-to-be professional football player is trained and tormented by his idol, and some scraps of notions about fame, obsession, and how far one is willing to go in order to become the best there is. The story seems to be building toward something, too, until the generic, out-of-left-field climax solidifies that no one involved with the movie seems to know what that something should be.

Director Justin Tipping doesn't even seem to have a grip on what the tone and method of this movie should be, either. It starts almost as broad satire, as a young boy watches his favorite football player Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans) throw a winning touchdown pass in the championship game of an off-brand substitute for the sport's real-life pro league. The play comes with a cost, however—namely a compound fracture of Isaiah's leg, which the broadcast camera lingers on for quite a bit. The kid's father wants to make sure his son is looking, too, because this, the dad tells his boy, is what a "real man" looks like.

Forget painfully questionable notions of masculinity, because the screenplay by the director, Skip Bronkie, and Zack Akers certainly does. Flashing forward more than a decade, Isaiah somehow returned from his catastrophic injury and went on to win a total of eight championships. Rumor has it that he's considering retirement, which coincidentally comes just as the college career of Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers), the kid from the prologue, is coming to a close. He's expected to be the top pick in the upcoming draft for the league, but a brutal attack by someone in a mascot costume puts that at risk.

With a slightly cracked skull and some brain trauma, Cameron's professional prospects are now in question. When his agent (played by Tim Heidecker) tells him that Isaiah's team is considering him as the star's replacement, Cameron is thrilled, especially when he learns that Isaiah has invited him to the football player's remote estate, where Isaiah will make sure that the rookie has what it takes.

From here, the story mostly plays as a mystery of sorts, in which the question for Cameron is how much he's willing to do to step into his hero's shoes. For us, it's wondering when a string of sinister hints and insinuations, Isaiah's monologues about dedication and sacrifice, and some occasional violence will actually become a narrative.

It's a good thing, really, that Tipping does construct a couple unsettling scenes over the course of the movie, while having Withers' naïve charm and Wayans' surprisingly intimidating performance to support the rest of the movie. The whole thing comes down to Cameron being a decent guy, who loves the sport and wants to succeed all the way to the top but also has a conscience, and Isaiah being a cruel, ruthless man who wants to transform the rookie into someone more like him.

This comes by way of a sports medicine doctor (played by Jim Jefferies) who keeps injecting Cameron with unspecified drugs, Isaiah repeatedly telling his mentee that the young man has to be willing to give up everything else for the sport, and some grisly moments when the talk escalates to action. The most notable one, perhaps, has Isaiah arranging a twisted drill for Cameron, in which the quarterback must catch the ball blind, do an about-face, and pass to someone within two seconds. If he fails in any way, some aspiring football player, who's just happy to be in Isaiah's presence, will get a ball to the face, propelled by a machine that keeps being sped up with every one of Cameron's mistakes.

Someone's murdered later, too, and it's implied that two other people are killed along with that victim. Oh, Isaiah's wife Elsie (Julia Fox), a social media influencer, tells Cameron that there are some rituals associated with a footballer's rise toward greatness, and the doctor keeps drawing and storing bags of Isaiah's blood for some reason. These pieces don't form any kind of comprehendible puzzle, until the final scenes spell it all out for us, and indeed, there's never really a sense of these assorted scenes and details leading from one to the next. The narrative here comes across as more of an outline for a plot that no one bothered to assemble.

The third act of Him, in fact, arrives hastily and spins the story in such a completely different direction, complete with a supernatural angle that isn't even suggested until then. It wouldn't be a surprise to learn that the ending was devised as a replacement for another one, given how disconnected it feels from everything before it.

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