The fever dream called ‘Him’

This felt like the perfect movie for me. I love Jordan Peele (he produced the movie), I love American football and I generally enjoy the horror genre. The premise also seemed very great. I still like it; the film seemed to set itself up pretty nicely for success in the opening scenes. Walking out of the theater though, I feel like I just spent 96 minutes in a fever dream, not unlike our main character, who was hallucinating at various times.

I do like the idea of a cult around the GOAT, Isaiah White played by Marlon Wayans, that we see in an early scene. Also, in that early scene though, we see intense security around White’s house. How does a cult member magically end up in the sauna? I don’t dislike that scene entirely, Wayans presumably killing her and then roughly saying something like we love the fans is a great ending to it in my book, but that act also sums up kind of my problems with the whole movie. It has some great moments, but struggles with coherency.

I thought it was an interesting watch, I didn’t hate it, but at the same time I would have a really hard time recommending it to anybody.

If I had to pick a favorite theme, it’s White’s line about football first, family second and God third. It’s a basic anecdote, but it’s true for lots of Americans and certainly it’s football stars.

Holistically, it felt like a mess. I absolutely understand the introspection on American football and think it is well intended, but it feels like it tries to be an all encompassing indictment against professional American football and as a result never really does anything noteworthy. The arguments it was trying to make were good, but it couldn’t effectively hammer down any single one of them. It seems to suggest that playing pro football is inherently dangerous, which is a good point. That being said, the main character gets hurt by a crazed fan much akin to Monica Seles, a tennis player. That had little to do with the characters playing actual football and being harmed because of football being an inherently violent game.

The ending also doesn’t do it any favors. It felt like we realized at the last minute that we were making a horror movie and decided to drastically ramp up the gore, because we were lacking in horror for the first hour plus. On a very surface level, we grazed over the idea of these contracts being exploitative and the owners being bad, but not in any sort of serious or meaningful way.

Also, why was everybody there wearing masks again? It doesn’t much sense aside from just wanting us to dehumanize them and root for the protagonist. It’s a cheap trick at best. It’s surface level symbolism and that is why this film disappoints. Everything in it is surface level.

The film is so broad and is mostly a rather confusing mess of jumbled ideas. It has its moments and its anecdotes, but overall it is a train wreck. It needs to pick an argument, stick to it and make sense. As it is, it feels like it bit off way more than it could chew and rather lacks any sort of relevant point.