HIM

HIM has a promising subject for a horror film: American football, with its appetite for bodily punishment and its promises of greatness. Justin Tipping gets some nasty images out of that subject, and Marlon Wayans gives it a threatening human presence. There is too little suspense or thought in the script for us to recommend it. At 96 minutes, it should have room to develop its ideas about what sporting ambition costs; instead, it spends too much time restating them.

As Isaiah, Marlon Wayans makes the quarterback threatening even when his motives are difficult to read. There is enough force in the performance to keep us watching through stretches where the story has little else to offer. Tyriq Withers, playing Cam, has enough charm to make us wish the writing gave him more to work with. With so little help from the story, the actors’ commitment has to account for much of our interest.

Kira Kelly’s dark cinematography suits a film that wants sporting ambition to feel unsafe. We winced at the X-ray-style violence, which makes bodily injury difficult to ignore. Those images give the criticism of football something specific to work with: the spectacle involves damage to a human body. Justin Tipping is less persuasive when the imagery becomes religious, because the broad suggestion that football has become a faith does little to clarify what the film thinks about its demands.

Jordan Ferrer’s production design helps make that religious imagery imposing, although its prominence also exposes how little the script does with it. There is care in the way the film looks, even when the symbolism is blunt. The Haxan Cloak’s unsettling score gives the images an unease they need, and it works without requiring the story to explain itself. The trouble is that ominous music can sustain discomfort for only so long when the action gives us so little to anticipate.

The screenplay by Justin Tipping, Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie keeps returning to brutality and sacrifice without making either more interesting. Its supernatural plotting is vague enough to weaken our sense of what is at stake, while its broader direction is disappointingly easy to predict. Taylor Joy Mason’s editing cannot bring much order to the competing emphases on football, horror and commentary. The film keeps changing how it presents its subject without finding much more to say about it.

As a sports horror film, it has a straightforward advantage: the physical punishment is already disturbing before anything supernatural is added. The opening suggests that familiar sporting demands might become frightening when we look at them closely. Instead, the increasingly excessive second half makes the football feel less important, and the scares rarely justify that move. We need some sense of how danger operates if we are going to worry about it, and the film leaves too much of that unclear.

No knowledge of football is needed to follow the complaint that success can demand too much of a person. What is missing is a more searching account of who accepts those demands and why. Marlon Wayans can hold our attention, but his performance cannot settle those questions for the writers. Anyone drawn by his name should be prepared for long stretches in which his presence is the only source of tension.