No Guts No Glory: Him

“It's asking the audience to look twice at what we worship and the cost of those rituals” - Marlon Wayans 

Football has been a staple in American culture since its beginning. The sport has been around longer than most remember, but the National Football League was officially founded in 1920, making America's biggest obsession 106 years old. Sunday is the main feature day for the NFL, a day dedicated to families screaming in the living room, but you can catch a game almost any night, depending on the type of game. While I don’t understand the obsession, I have landed on the idea that football is less about the games and more about the home state pride, believing in your team, the food, the community, and the culture. However, there's nothing in the world like a fall Friday night in high school, freezing, dressed in your school colors, cheering on your friends in the student section. Since the start in little league or the high school varsity team, all the way to the league, the game for the players is always and will always be about being the best, about being “him.”

Overview

The Movie starts with a young Cameron ‘Cam’ Cade played by Tyriq Withers, arguably the best part of the movie besides seeing Marlon Wayans, who plays quarterback Isaiah white, branching into movies beyond comedy. A young Cam is at a game with his dad when he is left distraught seeing his idol, Isaiah, endure a possibly career-ending hit. Cam's dad then goes on to tell him about how real men are willing to make that sacrifice for the game. 

Years later, Cam is a young football star and is training for the league combine, in which he plans to attend in pursuit of the Saviors QB position. Despite the risk of irreversible brain damage if he takes just one more hard hit. Lashing out at his family, he refuses to participate in the combine out of fear for his career, but when it is mentioned that Isaiah White would be training him, he agrees.

Over his time at the combine cam goes through a series of disturbing challenges that almost seem to the audience to be inducing concussions and brain damage to all the players in the combine. We also see moments where Cam is given shots the audience assumes are steroids, Cam is told it's an energy booster, but we learn it's something much, much worse. While in a sauna, Cam is then attacked by a woman in the combine, and Isiah comes in and kills her. Later on, Isaiah's wife seduces Cam and apologizes for Isaiah's behavior. Cam wakes up being held at gunpoint by Isaiah. 

Isaiah's wife invites Cam to a secret party to meet the owners of the Saviors. When Cam arrives, Marco, the team doctor, whispers to him to "run" before leaving. The owners offer Cam a strange red liquid, which he drinks, unaware that it is blood. A disoriented Cam finds a severed head in a plastic-lined room. Elsie comforts him as he loses consciousness. Cam later wakes up in an ice bath at Isaiah's compound, connected to an IV. As the movie has nothing more than 30 minutes left in run time, we watch Isaiah's whole idea of American football collapse and reveal a bigger and darker truth.

My Opinion

Initially, I didn’t watch this movie when it came out in 2025 because of the mixed reviews. Every girl that I asked said that it wasn't good, any guy that I asked told me they loved it, so my assumption was that the appeal was once again about football. My first time watching the movie, the only good parts to me were seeing Tyriq Withers in a bigger role and seeing Marlon Wayans dip into the horror genre in a non-joke way, like we have seen him in Scary Movie and A Haunted House. The movie itself feels like a sort of fever dream. I could never tell what was real or what was the effects of what they were doing to Cam, or even just the very obvious concussions going on with everyone. I do think this is a good movie if you like football movies, but by the second watch, I was still just as confused in the end as I was in the beginning, maybe even more.