{"id":237304,"date":"2025-09-18T21:35:12","date_gmt":"2025-09-18T21:35:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/237304\/"},"modified":"2025-09-18T21:35:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T21:35:12","slug":"jordan-peele-producers-horror-satire-with-marlon-wayans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/237304\/","title":{"rendered":"Jordan Peele producers horror satire with Marlon Wayans"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tI am not sure if director-writer Justin Tipping<\/a> (Kicks) and his co-writers Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie of the Black List screenplay<\/a> Him<\/a> were attempting a bold satire on the brutality of football and the game\u2019s cold-hearted view toward the safety of its players, but certainly the bones of a piercing blow-by-blow sacking of the sport are there. The problem is that Tipping \u2014 using lots of quick cuts, booming music cues, flashing X-rays of injuries and occult-style voodoo horror tropes \u2014 fails to run up any numbers on the scoreboard.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\n\tHim\u2019s marketing campaign suggests something akin to a religious experience with its wannabe star quarterback posing as some sort of Christ-on-the-cross-like figure in the ads with the tagline, \u201cGreatness demands sacrifices.\u201d I would add, \u201cMovies demand coherence.\u201d This one has none, or the satirical bite it demands \u2014 which probably is what attracted Jordan Peele<\/a> to want to produce it and use his name to sell it. After all, this is the guy who won an Original Screenplay Oscar for one of the all-time great horror satires, Get Out. Sorry, but I can\u2019t even get in to what the filmmakers were thinking in doing this mishmash of football and fright. And I seriously doubt the NFL will be endorsing it anytime soon.<\/p>\n

\n\tPlotwise, we are introduced to all-time great Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans<\/a>), an eight-time champion star quarterback for the San Antonio Saviors. He is at a place in his winding-down career where his contract is up, and so is his prime, witnessed by a brutal leg injury shown in vivid closeup. But for whatever reason, he is ready to turn on a dime and coach his potential successor, the ever-promising Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers<\/a>), who idolized him since he was a kid and unfortunately has become the victim of a vicious head injury (read: CTE) by some masked Halloween-y character who appears out of nowhere to lower the boom during a practice. <\/p>\n

\n\tCareer ending? Nope, not if White has his way. He invites Cade to his truly weird compound in the Texas desert, where you have to pass through a bunch of zombie-like characters protesting your arrival before you even get to the main event.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt is here that White promises to turn things around for Cade, putting him through a \u201ctraining\u201d week that gets oh so weird and involves football-throwing madness, blood transfusions, a scary sauna encounter with one of those bizarro creeps outside and a complete physical while totally naked in front of everyone, where he gets measured for success, as it were. If that is not enough, Wayans \u2014 doing his best Ruth Gordon circa Rosemary\u2019s Baby \u2014 takes it all to another level. Apparently a deal has been made with the devil, a la Tab Hunter wanting one great baseball season in Damn Yankees. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tIf only this had the smarts to make all this work as the horror movie it aspires to be, a la Zach Cregger\u2019s Barbarian and Weapons. Mostly Tipping just throws a lot of genre scare tactics that just lay there without impact. Faring best here is Wayans, playing it straight and exhibiting strong authority and a bit of mystery. He\u2019s in another movie. Withers, who spends most of time in a state of undress, certainly has the right physique to be believable as a pro prospect (he was a college player himself), but his role requires physicality and not much else. I was amused by Julia Fox<\/a> playing White\u2019s influencer wife who has been made up to look like something out of Hocus Pocus, as well as Tim Heidecker\u2019s aggressive agent who keeps urging his client to go along with all this strangeness. comic Jim Jeffries lands some much-needed laughs as the team doctor.<\/p>\n

\n\tProducers are Peele, Win Rosenfeld, Ian Cooper and Jamal Watson.<\/p>\n

\n\tTitle: <\/strong>Him
Distributor: <\/strong>Universal Pictures
Release date: <\/strong>September 19, 2025
Director: <\/strong>Justin Tipping
Screenwriters: <\/strong>Justin Tipping, Zack Akers, Skip Bronkie
Cast: <\/strong>Marlon Wayans, Tyriq Withers, Julia Fox, Tim Heidecker, Jim Jeffries, Maurice Greene
Rating: <\/strong>R
Running time: <\/strong>1 hr 36 mins<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I am not sure if director-writer Justin Tipping (Kicks) and his co-writers Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":237305,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,10200,58206,71578,127286,76657,53,76659,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-237304","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-him","10":"tag-jordan-peele","11":"tag-julia-fox","12":"tag-justin-tipping","13":"tag-marlon-wayans","14":"tag-movies","15":"tag-tyriq-withers","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115227455045760073","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237304\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}