Foul play: "Him"

Everything the shuffling The Smashing Machine gets right about pro sports is thrown into even sharper relief by what the insistently pumped-up, borderline berserk Him gets wrong about both pro sports and entry-level filmmaking. You can see where Justin Tipping's sophomore feature, brought to you by Jordan Peele's Monkeypaw Productions, is coming from: its not so very wild idea is to suggest that there's something fundamentally unhealthy, if not indeed outright evil, about the desire of those in competitive sports to groom, anoint, worship and exploit the next big thing. (I'm guessing Tipping and co-writers Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie weren't among those being picked first in P.E., despite having the first names Justin, Skip and Zack, but that shouldn't invalidate their point.) Wide-eyed gridiron prodigy Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers) suffers a mysterious head trauma before the title pronounces him the next big thing, and is soon being pushed back towards the fray, even though doctors maintain another such injury risks torpedoing his career altogether. That last fact is utterly lost on merciless coach Isaiah (Marlon Wayans), who welcomes the recovering Cameron to the bootcamp he operates out of a bunker in the desert (uh-oh), and is soon putting our boy through weaponised practise drills, starting relatively light before building up to the true gruntwork of targeted concussions and cold-blooded murder. Wisely, at no point does anybody mention the NFL, the highly litigious, multi-million dollar organisation that also brought America O.J. Simpson, Aaron Hernandez and Michael Vick; this would appear Tipping's one coachable tactic.

Clearly, this director isn't going for Friday Night Lights realism, rather a baroque, promo-adjacent style that pours on the visual bijouterie like Hennessy and sets a cacophonous soundclash (thumping needledrops, exaggerated-eruptive Foley work) atop that. A kind of compositional sense is evident - think Wes Anderson symmetries, painted over by Tarsem Singh at his most sleepless - but, boy, is it splurgy and erratic: the X-ray effect the film sporadically resorts to would have been most potently applied when Cam and Isaiah are snapping each other's limbs amid the finale, but that's the only time in these 96 minutes that Tipping thinks to err on the side of restraint. Story and characterisation seem some way down the list of directorial priorities. Instead of actors, Tipping casts abrasive personalities: Aussie comic Jim Jefferies is mostly indifferent as the bunker's medic, while Julia Fox, styled after Gaga as resident PR/white witch, is the biggest giveaway Tipping's looking beyond his own narrative to the red-carpet premiere. (If the one legit criticism of One Battle After Another is that it may well prove Tarantino's film of 2025, Him dares to envision something worse: Kanye's film of the year.) Withers offers a buff, bright-eyed charm that might usefully be repurposed in happier circumstances, and it's nice to see Wayans back in the game, but neither performer is well-served by a futzing script that barely identifies who these people are, and undercuts any slyer comic or satirical intent with regular bouts of blunt-force carnage; the images are every bit as aggressive and noisy as these characters are about football. I haven't for some while seen a calling-card movie that so obviously resembles a career suicide note: even if you don't flee the room covering your eyes and ears, all this grotesque opulence permits you is the one response, and it's that you make while watching a clash of heads in slo-mo replay. Eessh.

Him is now playing in cinemas nationwide.