I Can't Believe That the Company Behind <em>Sunday Night Football</em> Let Jordan Peele Make This Movie
(min-width: 1024px)709px,
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calc(100vw - 30px)" width="1560">This article contains spoilers for Him .
When I walked into my screening of Him , the new Jordan Peele–produced horror film set in the world of football, I had a specific set of fears. Was the overriding theme of this movie going to be that football is dangerous? Thanks, but Will Smith already made that movie , and I already get enough reminders every weekend in the fall. Would it be a movie about how NFL owners do not have the most progressive views on race? Thanks, but real life is clear enough on this score. Would it go the route of Playmakers , the early-2000s ESPN drama that the network canceled under pressure from the NFL? Thanks, but I am already aware that football has a dark underbelly and not all of the players are good role models.
Him is a weird movie. I don't know if I would call it “good.” If I were watching it through a less football-oriented prism, I doubt I would have found anything worthwhile in its hour and 36 minutes. But give this to Peele and director Justin Tipping: They found some new turf for this one. Him has plot holes that made me wonder if the people who made it had ever watched football, or if they were just hoping that the audience had not. But in other ways, Him understands pro football so well that when I walked out of the auditorium, I was stuck on something. I could not believe that treasured NFL broadcast partner NBCUniversal (by way of Universal Studios) had allowed Peele and his colleagues to make this thing. My press screening ticket was free, as was the popcorn. I would not have paid $22 to see it in theaters. But I would have paid many times that amount to watch it next to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell.
The movie centers on two quarterbacks. Marlon Wayans' Isaiah White is the best quarterback to ever play in the movie's fictional league that represents the NFL. Tyriq Withers, a real-life former Florida State football player, plays up-and-comer Cameron Cade. Isaiah is a megacelebrity who's nearing his retirement, and Cam is on the precipice of replacing him as QB of the league's best team. Cam, fresh off a brain injury that we see happen but is still somehow mysterious, goes to train at Isaiah's freaky compound. There, hell breaks loose. The first thing we see of the compound is a group of stans camped out next to the QB's home. A bedraggled woman throws her head into the window of Cam's SUV and screams, “WE DON'T WANT YOU!” After all, nobody could ever replace Wayans' character, the greatest quarterback of all time.
Fair enough. Sports fandom can be cult membership by another name. Playing professional sports can morph into cultship too, and the filmmakers spend a lot of time on the psychological oddity of both rooting for elite athletes and being them. But for a while, I wondered if the movie was going to pull punches when it came to the executives who actually ran this sport. By the time a team owner ended the movie beheaded up against a set of uprights, blood spurting from where his skull used to be, I had been disabused of that notion.
Still, the inconsistencies in the movie's internal logic are a bit much. The main one is that, while the football league in the movie plainly mimics the NFL's system for placing star rookies on new teams (there's a talent combine, for example), we see no draft, and Cam finds his way to a franchise that we're led to believe is the best in the fictional league. If Cam is really this good, there's no way he's winding up where he does. Very little about the circumstances that lead Cam into this bizarre situation is ever explained to us. Also never explained: the nature of his brain injury, which is somehow bad enough to nearly ruin his chance to play professional football but not bad enough that he is out of action for more than a few weeks.
But in the genre of TV and movies set in football, Him makes arguments that his peers do not. It has a knife to throw into the neck of pretty much everyone associated with a team, from the superfans who turn their allegiances into their entire personalities to the principals in the owner's box who happily charge them for the privilege. Sometimes the movie is such a mess that it also stabs itself , but even if it won't be topping anyone's list of the greatest football movies, it still makes some novel contributions to the canon.
The movie is at its best when it examines the sport's supposedly cultlike nature. The fictional San Antonio Saviors (subtle!) are a community institution, sinking their teeth into the hearts of fans young and old. The movie starts with a young Cam watching as Isaiah, at the beginning of his career, suffers a gruesome injury that threatens to knock him out of the sport. But Isaiah goes on to win eight championships—one more than Tom Brady, on whom the writers (director Tipping, Skip Bronkie, and Zack Akers) obviously based him. Isaiah's unconventional training methods and his quackish personal doctor appear to be Brady-inspired as well. Isaiah is a big enough star to make football fans lose their minds, literally. When he kills a fanatic who has crawled into his home like one of the infected from The Last of Us , then uses what we are led to believe is her corpse for rifle target practice, it appears he has done this before.
Certain elite athletes, in various sports, can gain a special hold on fans' psyche. But no position is more given to an intense, even parasocial relationship with fans than quarterback. Quarterbacks are the cult's charismatic front men—the living embodiments of the teams we care about, because winning without an excellent one is almost impossible. If your quarterback isn't great, then your team isn't great. And if your team isn't great, then you're a huge loser for investing time and money in it. This is a review of Him but might as well be a story about San Francisco 49ers fans and quarterback Brock Purdy . Unlike Purdy—a white guy whose true talent level is hotly debated by NFL fans—Isaiah and Cam are both megatalented stars and not white. (Isaiah is Black, and Cam is biracial.) As the older quarterback explains to the younger one, nonwhite QBs have an extra barrier to clear: getting coaches to trust them with the keys to the franchise. Isaiah's solution is to care about nothing else and be a generally insufferable guy.
This movie posits that to be a great quarterback, and to bear all of that weight, requires an athlete to be a psychopath. Normal people cannot do this, not even normal people with abnormal physical gifts. A quarterback must possess outrageous arrogance. He cannot care about other people. He has to drink whatever Kool-Aid the elders of the sport once told him to drink. He must give his life to the job. “I'm gonna go watch film,” Isaiah keeps repeating, reflexively, whenever someone invites him to go and do literally anything else. In the movie's most chilling scene, he puts Cam through a drill in which, for every unsuccessful throw by Cam, a football is fired from a machine directly into the face of a desperate free-agent receiver standing a foot away. The man is bashed to a pulp by a bunch of pigskins, then laughs maniacally and thanks his torturer for letting him play a small role in the molding of this new quarterback. It's zealots all the way down.
The Saviors have a series of bizarre initiation rituals for anyone who wants to join. Isaiah's doctor (played by comedian Jim Jefferies, whose character hates his job) gives Cam a series of involuntary injections. They are, it turns out, Isaiah's blood. When Isaiah was ascending to become the team's QB, he took the blood of his successor, who took it from his successor, and so on. Cam's promotion to the starting job requires him to beat Isaiah to death with a helmet, and look: Most NFL quarterback battles aren't that intense, but they're not far off either. Several of the greatest quarterbacks are famous for being assholes to their potential successors. Nobody who is so poorly adjusted that he could be a successful NFL QB will give up his job with grace.
Practically everyone turns out to be part of the machine. Cam and Isaiah share an agent (the comic Tim Heidecker), and he turns out to be a team functionary tasked with setting up the franchise's transition of power at quarterback. Isaiah's famous influencer wife (played by Julia Fox) spends most of the movie seeming like a half-assed representation of WAG culture , until we learn that she, too, works for the organization. Imagine if Taylor Swift were a Kansas City Chiefs employee who was marrying Travis Kelce only so that she could organize his execution by whoever is to become the Chiefs' next starting tight end. Again, it might not be good , but I respect the effort to say something about just how many tentacles a pro football team has.
This fish burps from the head, which Cam eventually chops off. The Saviors' owner (Richard Lippert) demands that the young quarterback sign his contract to replace Isaiah, whom he just beat to death. The owner calls Cam “boy” and threatens to kill his family if he doesn't sign it. And when Cam walks away from the contract, his prospective employers all dead on the field and red-white-and-blue vapor trails streaming through the sky behind him, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to have learned. But—especially in a moment of accelerating corporate censorship superpowered by ever-increasing media consolidation —I've gotta respect that the same parent company that broadcasts Sunday Night Football was willing to give the green light to whatever this was.
