This week, two different films about football, neither of which is likely to crack the sports movie canon. Him has the bones of a terrific premise: A hotshot young quarterback prospect named Cam Cade (Tyriq Withers), on the verge of being drafted by a pro team, is invited for a week of intense training at the home of Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). Isaiah’s the team’s current quarterback, an all-time great and Cam’s childhood hero, and a player who’s managed to remain active well into advanced age.
The premise is such an obvious parody of Tom Brady’s late-career arc, and his mysterious and shadowy TB-12 training program—complete with Wayans constantly calling himself “The GOAT”—that I’m shocked it’s reaching theaters without Brady threatening to sue the filmmakers. (The only differences are that Isaiah White… isn’t white, the 53-year-old Wayans is way older than Brady was at the end, and the real Brady was never especially interested in training a young protege.) But unfortunately, that’s just about the only good idea in a film that must’ve been written by people who barely know anything about the modern NFL. It also doesn’t help that Withers, as the lead, is a charisma-less non-entity, although Wayans is pretty good.
The two get into mind games and other manly brinksmanship—think Whiplash—and we’re meant to believe the old guy isn’t ready to pass the torch. Cam also starts seeing unnatural visions. The film takes its time before revealing what’s “really” going on. Satanic? A sharp racial allegory? But what it comes up with is underwhelming and dumb—just a witless and senseless bloodbath. The film doesn’t use real team names or reference the NFL, but even the basics make no sense. He’s at the “combine,” which looks nothing like the real thing. How does a winning team with an all-time great at quarterback have the #1 pick? If he’s in the pre-draft process, why is he spending a week at the home of a future teammate, at what sometimes looks like his house but other times like a team practice facility? Why does this pre-draft workout have full contact with pads? Why is he being offered a contract when the draft hasn’t happened yet? And are we to assume this pseudo-NFL doesn’t test for performance-enhancing drugs or blood doping?
Also, there’s an early mystery about who attacked Cam on a practice field, which is solved in a half-assed way. It’s eventually established that the team owner’s important to what’s happening. But we learn nothing about him at all as a character, he’s just an anonymous old rich guy with almost no screen time. Why not parody Jerry Jones, Robert Kraft, Daniel Snyder or Jim Irsay (RIP), and give the actor a character to play? Julia Fox, at least, has some fun as an over-the-top WAG type. But the idea of Tim Heidecker as a smarmy football agent is loaded with potential, and the film doesn’t do anything funny with it.
But it’s better than 80 For Brady.
This week’s other new football movie, strangely, is also about a man who’s still playing football in his 50s. The Senior isn’t as bad as Him; it’s just slight. It’s essentially the same movie as Rudy, only if Rudy had been a nearly 60-year-old man. Him mocks the well-worn cliches about “faith, football, and God,” but The Senior takes all of them at face value.
It’s based on the true story of Mike Flynt, who, after starring at Permian—the Friday Night Lights high school— played football for Division III Sul Ross State University in Texas in the early-1970s. In his final year, he was kicked out of both the team and school for fighting, something he spent the bulk of his adult life regretting.
Decades later, after attending a reunion, Mike decided to undo that wrong, go back to school, and finish out his eligibility. So he returned to football in 2007, as a 59-year-old grandfather, when he was older than both his own coach (Rob Corddry) and the fathers of most of his teammates. The Senior, starring Michael Chiklis as Flynt, was directed by Rod Lurie; these days, even faith-based films from Angel Studios are directed by Jewish guys. Mary Stuart Masterson, if you remember her from the 1980s, plays Flynt’s wife.
It’s an interesting story, one I don’t think I remember happening. The film is hokum, but it’s at least well-intentioned and fairly inoffensive hokum. The baseball version of this was The Rookie, although that guy was only 38, and the movie did a much better job playing out the formula. Is it healthy, physically, for a 59-year-old man to play college football? Is it healthy, in any way, for a man of that age to look to be so motivated by a decades-old grudge? We’re not meant to ask too many questions.