Starring Marlon Wayans, Tyriq Withers, Julia Fox

Directed by Justin Tipping

Monkeypaw / Universal Pictures – in Cinemas now

After a potentially career-ending injury, a young American Football quarterback is invited to train with his hero, a regime that asks for more of him than he was expecting.

‘Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.’ So said legendary Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly (reputedly). Taken to literal extremes, and translated to the slick, corporate, mega-million dollar world of American Football, this homely adage could well serve as the starting point for a great sporting horror movie.

Unfortunately, in the case of Justin Tipping’s new Jordan Peele-produced movie, HIM, the proverbial ball hasn’t just been dropped, it has bounced over the fence into the backyard of a drug-crazed narrative lunatic who won’t give it back.

I love a homoerotic-voodoo-satanist-Faustian horror fantasy as much as the next man, but preferably when it makes some kind of sense, and features characters I give a stuff about. HIM is a horrible incoherent mess. Visually, it’s as slick as a Nike ad (with added gore and hallucinogens) but Mr Tipping and his two writing companions, Skip Bronkie and Zack Akers, (it took three people to come up with this mind-numbingly elongated ejaculation) seem to think that starting with everything cranked up to eleven and staying there for the full 96 minutes is something other than the cinematic equivalent of a full-on migraine.

I might have enjoyed the gross-out ending had the journey to it been one of incremental dread, paranoia and creeping terror as opposed to one long Lynchian fever dream playing at full volume and 78 rpm. We’re in the same ballpark as The Substance – and to a lesser extent Peele’s own Get Out – but without the coherent opening acts that actually give those movies their shape and emotional heft.

It’s a shame because the two leads – Tyriq Withers as the young quarterback, and Marlon Wayans as his idol, Isiah White – play it like they believe every word, but their sterling efforts can’t survive the indulgent tediosity of the enterprise as a whole.

Verdict: There’s a great movie to be made about a young footballer’s Faustian pact in his quest to be the G.O.A.T., but HIM isn’t it. 2/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com