Him review: Jordan Peele-produced football ‘horror’ loses it in over-the-top execution

When Peggy March popularised the song I Will Follow Him, it was an anthem about love, albeit one that is distressingly obsequious.

For a younger generation, that song was reframed as a religious devotion thanks to Whoopi Goldberg’s rousing rendition in Sister Act.

I Will Follow Him isn’t in the Jordan Peele-produced thriller Him, but it may as well be ringing in your ears as the film attempts to re-order the popular American phrase, “god, family, football”.

The “him” in the title could be god, it could be football, but it’s also what the lead characters either believe themselves to be or aspires to be, the greatest of all time. It’s all interchangeable. God is football is GOAT. Don’t worry so much about the family part.

But if you’re some gridiron diehard walking into Him and expecting to have your time, faith and loyalty reinforced, you may be in for a shock.

Him is not particularly generous about the sport, the fidelity it demands and, mostly definitely, not about how it’s handled CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy). The letters are not explicitly said but the subtext is not subtle.

Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) is a promising young football player whose father drilled into him from a very young age that football is everything. Winning, being the GOAT is worth every sacrifice, and “real men” will do whatever it takes.

So far, so toxic.

The intensity doesn’t let up from there as Cam joins his hero, Isaiah (Marlon Wayans), the star quarterback for the Saviours, at his private compound in the desert, ostensibly for a week of training to see if Cam can handle the pressures of the big leagues.

Things get weird. Cam is injected with mysterious vials of blood, there’s a violent training session where a lot of blood is spilled, and there’s the ever present creepiness of Isaiah’s biggest fans, hanging around at the edges out of the compound, and not at all accepting of Cam.

As Isaiah, Wayans (the youngest of the first generation Wayans who at 53 easily passes for a character in his early 40s), infuses an unhinged unpredictability to a man who really believes his own hype.

But he’s not playing unwavering confidence, there’s a malice to it, and he keeps Cam and the viewers constantly on edge. Oozing charisma, danger and repellent masculinity, Wayans is one of the main reasons the film works as much as it does in the first half.

Withers’s Cam in some ways functions as the audience surrogate, a babe-in-the-woods figure whose reality is challenged by the isolation and immersion in this strange place, and you may not even realise as the film leads you down the road in which you start to question what you think it means to be great.

Directed by Justin Tipping from a script he co-wrote with Skip Bronkie and Zack Akers, Him is brimming with big ideas about the cooked dynamics of professional sports leagues, especially the NFL which the film has rebranded with a different acronym, and its role in American history and society.

It’s asking questions about black and brown bodies in a sport that is owned and controlled by old white men, and the NFL’s complicity in ignoring the damage CTE wreaks on players.

It makes some bold stylistic choices in the way characters are framed within the production design of Isaiah’s off-kilter compound, and the sound design is effective – about the only time Him verges into “horror”.

But Him falls apart in the second half as it becomes overwhelmed by everything it wants to say about football as a religion - and subtext very quickly becomes text.

Even worse, it telegraphs everything that’s coming and as soon as you figure it out (not hard), the film doesn’t do much to hold your attention. It’s neither funny enough nor scary enough to distract you from that.

By the time it limps to the end with an over-the-top but kind of lame display of violence, there’s not much left to ask except, “What the hell was that?”.

Rating: 2/5

Him is in cinemas