Justin Tipping

To watch sports is to subject yourself to a vocabulary riddled with hyperbole and cliché. You need to give 110%. The best players eat, sleep, and breathe the game. Athletes are soldiers, and every contest is a war. It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

Him, the new movie from Justin Tipping, attempts to literalize this sort of inflated rhetoric. It imagines a heightened surreality where a draft prospect’s training regimen takes place at a militaristic boot camp, and where professional success equates to personal survival. It takes the metaphor out of blood sport.

Conceptually speaking, this isn’t a horrible idea. By their nature, movies dramatize and embellish real-life experiences, and the obsessive character of modern sports—the players’ pursuit of excellence, the fans’ deranged zeal, the economy’s spending of billions on advertising and gambling—naturally lends itself to an outsized treatment. So the problem with Him isn’t that it’s absurd. The problem is that it’s stupid. Read More