HIM

There's real filmmaking craft in HIM. Marlon Wayans throws himself into the role of Isaiah White with wild, unsettling abandon, and the movie builds genuine dread as a young football phenom discovers the dark secret behind his idol's success. The training sequences are intense, inventive, and often frightening in the way good horror should be.

But the film doesn't know when to stop. By the finale, it collapses into a bloodfest, and its hero — the one we're meant to root for — goes well beyond defending himself. Add well over a hundred obscenities, an implied orgy with explicit nudity, and demonic imagery meant to unsettle, and you have a film whose excess swallows its own better instincts.

There are allusions to Christianity, sacrifice, and even a moment of mercy buried in here. They don't outweigh what surrounds them. Skip it.

Cameron Cade is a young football phenom on the edge of greatness — good enough, some say, to eclipse his childhood idol, championship quarterback Isaiah White. After a mysterious, violent attack leaves Cameron recovering from a head injury, he gets an unexpected invitation: come train under Isaiah himself, at The Saviors' remote desert facility. Against his mother's wishes, he goes. What he finds there is not the mentorship he expected.

Three stars means HIM is genuinely well-made — just not well-behaved. The direction is vivid, the training sequences are inventive and often disturbing in the best horror sense, and Marlon Wayans commits fully to Isaiah's menace, giving the film its most memorable presence. As pure craft, it holds attention.

Where it falters is restraint. The back half tips from tense horror into an over-the-top bloodfest, and the story's moral shape gets lost in the excess — the hero meant to stand against evil ends up matching it. It's a movie with real filmmaking instincts that doesn't trust itself to stop.

HIM mixes a pagan worldview with genuine Christian elements — a positive reference to Scripture, imagery of sacrifice, and a hero who ultimately takes a stand against a demonic cult. That's worth noting. Isaiah's stated motto, "Football, Family, then God" — inverting the more familiar "God, Family, Football" — names precisely what the film is about: an idol built where God should be. When the cult members turn violent, Cameron mostly fights in self-defense, and he even performs one act of mercy along the way. But the film also lets him go overboard with the violence he metes out, blurring the line between resisting evil and becoming consumed by it. The demonic imagery is deliberately frightening, underlining how far the villains have fallen — but the film also folds in a politically pointed subplot about white team owners exploiting Black players, a theme handled more as commentary than storytelling.

What HIM understands, even in its excess, is that misplaced worship destroys people. A game, a legacy, a championship ring — none of it was built to bear the weight of ultimate devotion, and the film's cult is really just idolatry made literal and monstrous. Scripture named this danger long before any football field existed: "You shall have no other gods before me" (Exodus 20:3). The ache for glory Cameron feels isn't wrong — it's aimed at the wrong throne.

HIM has talent behind the camera and a genuinely eerie performance at its center, and it even gestures toward real spiritual truth about idolatry and sacrifice. But the excess — the language, the violence that outruns self-defense, the explicit sexual content — overwhelms whatever it gets right. Our answer stands: skip it. Looking for something to watch instead? Try our latest family-friendly picks.