Weekend Mullings - HIM

I'll hand this to HIM. It had an intriguing enough trailer to get me to a screening despite a plot seemingly centered on football, a sport I loathe. I guess I had hopes a horror movie take on the sport might delve into those things that bother me so much about it: its culture of violence; its history of CTE; its exploitation of Black players by white billionaire owners. These are topics ripe for the horror treatment. 

Perhaps someone else will give it a try one day, because HIM's attempts to tackle these topics misses the goal completely.

I can't remember the last time I saw a major studio release that was such a mess. The plot, such as it is, finds Cam (Tyriq  Withers) an up and coming quarterback suffer a brain injury after an attack (by the team mascot? A demon? A crazed fan?) that threatens to derail his career. When his idol, San Antonio Saviors (lol) quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans) invites Cam to train at his compound for a week, Cam accepts, with hopes that this could lead to him becoming Isaiah's successor.

What follows is a series of baffling scenarios where Cam "trains," by throwing passes on Isaiah's indoor football field while a fellow player is pummeled in the face by a football every time Cam misses. Where Cam gets medical "treatment" from Isaiah's doctor (Jim Jefferies), which consists of random injections of something that's never identified. Where Cam sits in various ice baths and saunas in Isaiah's labyrinthian, concrete compound, while nightmarish individuals that may or may not be real haunt him. 

At times, what Cam experiences is clearly all in his mind. At other times, the weirdness is real. But Cam is such a void, and often devoid of any real emotion, and the film offers no clear delineation between the fantasy and reality, and that just leaves the viewer unmoored. What we end up with is a series of surreal moments - and granted, some of them are visually striking - but with no real story or plot to make sense of it all. It ultimately leads to a finale that manages to be both too on the nose, and completely. WTF.