Producers:  Jordan Peele, Win Rosenfeld, Ian Cooper and Jamal Watson   Director: Justin Tipping Screenplay: Skip Bronkie, Zack Akers and Justin Tipping   Cast: Marlon Wayans, Tyriq Withers, Julia Fox, Tim Heidecker, Jim Jefferies, Maurice Greene, Chase Garland, Naomi Grossman, Richard Lippert and Austin Pulliam Distributor: Universal Pictures

Grade: F

No doubt you’ll be shocked—shocked!—to learn that pro football is a brutal business that uses and abuses players and then spits them out when they’re washed up.  Or that there are scads of young guys out there who would do anything, or just about anything, to become the next big thing on the team roster. 

One such is Cam Cade, who as a lad (Austin Pulliam) in the prologue of Justin Tipping’s atrocious “HIM,” was brought up by his father (Don Benjamin) to aspire to become the greatest quarterback of all time—GOAT for short.  His daddy not only plopped him in front of the TV to watch the games, but, if one flashback is to be taken seriously, conspired with the owner of their favorite team, the ironically named Saviors, to raise his son for the position.  Naturally the kid idolized the Saviors’ QB Isaiah White (Marion Wayans), who played through injuries to win multiple Super Bowls.

Now Cam is a grown man (Tyriq Withers), a college star on the cusp of the NFL draft.  But on a dark field after practice one night he’s attacked from behind by a ghoulish team mascot wielding an axe, and it takes surgery to close the gash in his skull.  But despite warnings about the danger the injury poses to his survival if he insists on playing, he’s determined to continue his football career.

That’s why, encouraged by his avaricious manager (Tim Heidecker), he jumps at the chance when White invites him to train at his remote facility deep in the desert.  Cam’s one of the characters in movies like this who have never seen a real one in which such invitations turn out badly—whether they come from a robotics genius (“Ex Machina”), a rock legend (“Opus”), a disgraced entrepreneur (“Blink Twice”) or even your girlfriend’s parents (“Get Out” by Jordan Peele, a producer here).  So he’s thrilled to say yes.

But of course White proves to be a malevolent taskmaster, a mixture of crudely avuncular encourager and demonic sadist, who, among other things, has a volunteer (Chase Garland) slammed in the face with a high-velocity football every time Cam fails to connect with a pass.  Cam himself has to submit to curious blood transfusions and injections overseen by Isaiah’s high-strung doctor (Jim Jefferies) and his menacing aide-de-camp (Maurice Greene).  He has hallucinations—or are they?—in which, for example, he’s attacked by a white-faced, spaced-out wacko while in the sauna and has to strangle her to death.  There are also ghostly apparitions, including that mascot axe-wielder from early on. 

All of this is depicted in garish tones by cinematographer Kira Kelly, who sometimes switches to a sort of X-ray animation to show the internal damage done to the bodies of brutalized players, with the various bits often cobbled together into manic montages by editor Taylor Joy Mason, whose work is so frenetic that one imagines he might have gotten some injections from Jefferies’ unprincipled physician.  (At one point, for example, he abruptly inserts a tableau of a meal at White’s compound mimicking Da Vinci’s “Last Supper.”  When Buñuel did something similar with serious purpose in “Viridiana” in 1961, it was denounced as blasphemous.  Here it’s just flippant, and no one will complain.)  Jordan Ferrer’s lurid production design and Dominique Dawson’s gaudy costumes—a glittering dress worn by White’s wife (Julia Fox), who’s apparently some sort of influencer, positively hurts the eye—complete a supremely ugly look.  Even an overbearing score by Bobby Krlic can’t compete.

The picture concludes with two fight scenes that end it on a truly grotesque note.  The first is an entirely predictable mano-a-mano between Isaiah and Cam to determine which will be the Saviors’ starting QB next fall.  That grimly protracted battle is bad enough, but it’s followed by an outdoor signing ceremony that becomes part Busby Berkeley exercise in synchronized marching and part “Gladiator”-inspired arena event in which Cam must face down the powers that have controlled the business for years.  (They actually wear pigskins!)  It’s a gorily decisive outcome which includes, among other things, a decapitated corpse that spews forth a fountain of blood from the neck.  That’s supposed to have some sort of triumphant feel to it, but in reality it’s just the culmination of a baroquely hideous satire of the realities of pro football that doesn’t know the difference between a horror movie and a simply horrible one.

In the mess neither star distinguishes himself.  Wayans tries hard to make White imposingly frightening, but he never gets beyond caricature, and Tipping encourages Wither to be more hunky symbolic statue than human being.  Fox has a few moments of sultry glamor, and both Heidecker and Jefferies appear to be aware that the material cries out for a tongue-in-cheek approach, but neither takes it far enough.

Cam’s been concussed in the events leading up to his time with White, and so we see him occasionally throws up when the physical demands of training are too severe.  There are times in “HIM” that are so disgusting you might feel inclined to retch, too.  Resist it; remember that there are young theatre employees, many of them probably high school footballers themselves, who have to clean up the place after you’ve gone.  Be more considerate of them than the filmmakers who have inflicted this cinematic abomination on unsuspecting audiences have been to us.

Producers: Steve Chasman, Keitz Kjarval, Brad Furman, Jess Fuerst, Jim Seibel, Christopher Milburn and Brad Feinstein   Director: Brad Furman   Screenplay: Brad Furman, Jess Fuerst and Pablo Fenjves   Cast: Scott Eastwood, John Leguizamo, Nora Arnezeder, Jamie Foxx, Robert De Niro, Shamier Anderson, Yul Vazquez, Rita Ora, Saïd Taghmaoui, Eire Farrell, Alexa Feinstein, Xen Sams and Laurence Mason    Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films

Grade: F

You have to assume that the cast and crew thought that there was some potential in “Tin Soldier.”  After all, writer-director Brad Furman had turned both “The Lincoln Lawyer” and “The Infiltrator” into pulpy fun, and if “Runner” and “City of Lies” were disappointing, both at least were competently made.

Why, then, is his newest such an unmitigated disaster?  One could point to individual factors.  The dialogue is terrible, made all the worse by reams over voice-over reflections by the protagonist that make the phrase purple prose an understatement.  Tim Maurice-Jones’ cinematography is merciless, veering from murky gloom to eye-piercing brightness.  Crispian Sallis’s production design is simply ugly, while Chris Hajian music drones on with predictable groans and flourishes.  Worst of all, Jarrett Fijal’s editing turns the entire thing into a choppy mess, with piles of flashbacks jostling with a “contemporary” narrative that’s gibberish to start with.  There’s also some hilariously bad VFX to contend with.

But even more detrimental is the attempt to say something about PTSD and cults in the context of an overblown action movie seemingly inspired by, of all things, the FBI assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco in 1993, with a saccharine romance added to the mix.  The combination is tasteless in the extreme, and even some good—in some cases, excellent—performers can do nothing with it.  Not that most of them really try.

In any event, the focal point of things is Nash Cavanaugh (Scott Eastwood), an ex-soldier whose combat experience had left him in psychological tatters. He fell under the sway of charismatic leader Leon K. Prudhomme (Jamie Foxx), who, we eventually learn, had been provided with government subsidies to create a program to assist veterans suffering from PTSD.  But he transformed the effort into a cult.  Styling himself The Bokushi, he created what he called simply The Program, turning his followers, ensconced in an impregnable fortress in Idaho, into an army of super-warrior Shinjas who would build a utopia called Eutierria, a goal that involves ridding the world of those who would seek to prevent its implementation.

Nash was a true believer, but fell in love with Evoli (Nora Arnezeder), one of the female members of the group, and the two shared bucolic frolics in the compound’s rustic environs until The Bokushi intervened, informing Nash that he had to approve all such couplings.  Nash and Evoli decided to escape, but their car was attacked and, in the ensuing crash (one of the better-executed action moments), she was apparently killed.  Nash returned to the outside world, more traumatized than ever.

So much for the backstory, told in fragments through flashbacks, Nash’s dreary voice-overs, and sluggish exposition by Emmanuel Ashburn (Robert De Niro), an enigmatic guy who admits to having initially helped start Prudhomme’s work and is now allied with Luke Dunn (John Leguizamo), an undercover FBI man, in a plan to invade the Idaho compound and end the cult.  They ask Cavanaugh to join them, using his personal knowledge of the facility’s interior to their advantage, and pressure him by implying that Evoli survived the crash and is still alive inside.  This is Nash’s chance to save her.

The bulk of the movie consists of the assault on the compound, depicted in a series of sloppy, poorly staged episodes bogged down by Nash’s boring ruminations and more dreary flashbacks, and culminating in a final confrontation between him and The Bokushi in a gargantuan arena beside a dam that serves as The Program’s secret lair.  Their fight goes on interminably until an explosion creates a breach in the dam that unleashes an unconvincing wall of water.

The cast is utterly defeated by the material, but in different ways.  Eastwood is simply dull, looking dazed not so much by Nash’s pain but by his own incomprehension.  By contrast Foxx goes wildly overboard with the ranting and strutting—he was more restrained as a Spider-Man villain—and snarling Leguizamo isn’t far behind. (Foxx’s table-top hairdo will certainly provoke giggles.)  Arnezeder demonstrates little chemistry with Eastwood, and De Niro gives what for him is a perfunctory turn, all grizzle without sizzle.  The supporting cast mostly seems justifiably baffled by the goings-on.

Perhaps “Tin Soldier,” shot mostly in Greece and Eastern Europe, once had some logical shape and a coherent story to tell.  But in its final form, running only eighty minutes, it feels like something that’s truncated yet still overlong, desperately thrown together from clumps of material that Furman has tried to link together by the addition of those inanely soapy voice-over bursts.  The result is terrible, and it certainly doesn’t make one wish for a future director’s cut.