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Marlon Wayans is putting up a “defensive run-stopping front” after his latest film received negative reviews from critics.

The actor took to his Instagram account over the weekend to promote his latest film, “HIM,” which hit the big screen Friday, and told fans to form their own opinions on the project. The movie currently holds a 29% score with critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

“An opinion does not always mean it’s everyone’s opinion. Some movies are ahead of the curve,” Wayans said. “Innovation is not always embraced and art is to be interpreted and it’s subjective.”

The post include screen grabs from the Rotten Tomatoes pages of his other movies that have been classified “rotten” by the website but were later embraced by audiences like 2004’s “White Chicks,” the first two films in the “Scary Movie” franchise, 2013’s “A Haunted House” and 1996’s “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood.” The post ends with a screen grab of the “HIM” Rotten Tomatoes page.

“I’ve had a career of making classic movies that weren’t critically received and those movies went on to be CLASSICS. So don’t take anyone’s opinion just go see for yourself,” Wayans added.

So far, audiences have given the film a 58% on Rotten Tomatoes.

The Times film critic, Amy Nicholson, credited the the film for its “stylishly” craftsmanship but said it was lacking plot.

“Is football a game or a religion?” the sports broadcaster Howard Cosell once asked with exasperation. The horror film “Him,” a striking but vacuous gridiron Grand Guignol by Justin Tipping (“Kicks”) takes it as faith that the answer is both. Any fan with a sacred good luck ritual and any player who’s thanked the man upstairs for a touchdown knows the two overlap as tightly as a freshly laced pigskin.

In the home of young elementary schooler Cameron Cade (Austin Pulliam), the fictional San Antonio Saviors quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans) is the messiah. Next to the TV, there’s even a shrine with devotional portraits of their icon. When White wins a game while suffering a nasty injury, Cameron’s father seizes the moment to deliver a sermon: “That’s what real men do,” he insists. “They make sacrifices.” The candles on the altar flicker ominously.

Tipping, working from a Blacklist script by Skip Bronkie and Zack Akers with Jordan Peele as his producer, considers the sports-as-religion idea so obvious that the film doesn’t bother analyzing why it exists. Instead, “Him” wonders what kind of spiritual practice it is: hero worship or a sinister cult?

Fourteen years later, Cameron (now played by Tyriq Withers) has grown up to become a star college quarterback in line to be the NFL’s top draft pick and take over Isaiah’s position on the Saviors. A violent concussion knocks him off course, but Isaiah, a living legend still leading the team, offers to vouch for the kid if he passes a private training camp at his intimidating desert estate. It couldn’t be more obvious that Isaiah doesn’t have Cameron’s best interests at heart if he blared a warning on the Jumbotron.

The film’s title comes from a bit of braggadocio — “I’m him” — that started sprouting up in sports leagues during the last five years. (It’s why you’ll sometimes see Lakers shooting guard Austin Reaves called “AustHIM” Reaves.) Anointing someone the GOAT, as in “Greatest of All Time,” has been around longer, but the silly thing about both compliments is they’re getting handed out like Halloween candy. Whether Cameron can become the next GOAT is the movie’s main obsession. Yet it resonates, albeit vague and unexplored, with biblical references to goat offerings and images of Jesus as a sacrificial lamb and the movie’s visual allusions to the goat-headed occult idol Baphomet. Plus, it offers us in the audience the thrill of wondering if someone will get spit-roasted.

Cameron enters Isaiah’s home to discover his host surrounded by what looks like taxidermy sheep skins. Nearly all of the film takes place in his compound, a circular warren that looks like a combination of an ancient temple and the Superdome. We’re continually happy to discover all the menacing delights that production designer Jordan Ferrer has concocted. Inside, there’s unnerving minimalist furniture, dramatic saunas and ice baths and an indoor football field with a throwing machine powerful enough to knock out a tooth. Even more terrifying, there’s Isaiah’s lifestyle-influencer wife, Elsie (Julia Fox), who stomps around with a pointy shard of jade that Cameron is supposed to stick up his rear. (You know, for peak performance.) Meanwhile, outside the gates, Isaiah’s cult followers — like visibly brain-fried Marjorie (Naomi Grossman) — are furious that their champion may retire.

Like “Kicks,” Tipping’s excellent 2016 feature debut about a kid who risks his neck for a pair of Nikes, “Him” is about the bloody quest for respect. It wants to be “The Substance” with jockstraps: a Satanic-tinged, steroidal “Rosemary’s Baby.” The film is so stylishly done that I could accept it on those plain terms. Every shot is a stunner, from stark images of eerily spinning footballs to goalposts that loom like devil’s horns. Editor Taylor Joy Mason and cinematographer Kira Kelly have put together queasy-brilliant montages with some kind of an eye-popping camera technique — a mix of thermal imaging, X-ray footage and visual effects — that seems to see right inside the actors’ bodies to their gristle and goo. Bobby Krlic (a.k.a. the Haxan Cloak), who also composed the music for “Midsommar,” wows us with a tragic, thundering score.

But the movie’s thoughts about pain and devotion and locker-room manipulation are still gestating. After I made it to the end of the story and ran it back, little of the plot hung together. I couldn’t with any conviction answer rudimentary questions such as how much does Cameron even want to play football? Or what in Hades will happen to the surviving characters?

Part of the issue is that Tipping and Withers have created a rising football player who might be too authentic. Withers moves with physical confidence and perfect posture and drilled obedience. Participating in a mock media training day, you buy that he was born to sell sneakers.

He speaks with an athlete’s guardedness, too, that post-game interview cadence where each wooden sentence tries to bore the camera into leaving them alone. Cameron describes his football career clinically and neutrally like he’s a product; he refers to himself “performing,” not “playing,” as the latter would imply he’s on the field to have fun.

Surrounded by trainers and doctors and his childhood hero, he acquiesces to pretty much everything, from receiving random injections to a brutal bludgeoning. (At least he doesn’t do you-know-what with that jade crystal.) I’m willing to blame some of that passivity on his head injury, but it’s hard to care about a character who only has a personality for three minutes.

At least Wayans gets to cut loose. His bullying Isaiah sprints from pep talks to threats in the same breath and runs around in nifty outfits covered in weighted beads. He’s in such peak physical condition that you believe Isaiah’s conviction that it’s possible to outrace Father Time. Realizing afterward that Wayans is 53 — almost a decade older than Tom Brady when he retired after announcers even more bold than Cosell treated him like Methuselah — you just might be tempted to bow down to Baphomet yourself.

Since it first premiered in 1926, F.W. Murnau’s “Faust” has been lauded as one of the greatest silent films ever made. And in the century that’s followed, striking a deal with the devil has been one of cinema’s most enduring tropes.

“Him,” the Jordan Peele-produced horror film reaching theaters Friday, is the latest testament to the fact that, in Hollywood at least, the devil’s offer never goes out of style.

It tells the story of an aspiring professional football player, Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers), who gets invited to train at a secluded compound under famed quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). But Cade eventually realizes what is meant by the question he keeps getting asked: “What are you willing to sacrifice?”

“People are so fixated with the whole selling your soul to the devil and they really think that it’s a man in a suit who’s like, ‘Sign the dotted line,’” said Julia Fox, who plays White’s wife. “I think that selling your soul to the devil is a metaphor for selling out and doing things that you don’t want to do, compromising your morals and values for a paycheck.”

Like “Him,” Faustian stories in cinema are often billed as horror. Much like the literary and artistic retellings of the German fable, from Marlowe and Goethe to the song “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” film adaptations span place, decade and genre — from the cult Keanu Reeves’ DC Comics adaptation, “Constantine,” to Brendan Fraser’s 2000 rom-com “Bedazzled,” a remake of the 1967 film of the same name that starred Raquel Welch.

The devil can promise money — as in “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” the 1941 post-Great Depression takedown of greed — or fame, a la Jack Black’s 2006 musical comedy, “Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny.”

“It’s pretty much everywhere once you start looking,” said Kirsten Thompson, a professor of film studies at Seattle University. “We all want to have eternal life or youth or power or status. And the various iterations of the myth sometimes emphasize different things.”

“Him” isn’t even the first Faustian film set against the backdrop of sports. “Damn Yankees,” the 1958 adaptation of the Bob Fosse-choreographed Broadway show, tells the story of a diehard baseball fan who makes a devilish pact to help his team.

Murnau’s ‘Faust’ legacy

Although the 1926 “Faust” isn’t the oldest cinematic retelling of the legend — French filmmaker Georges Méliès made a handful of adaptations beginning in the 1890s — Murnau’s movie has the greatest legacy.

“The film has these very striking set pieces that are, visually, enormously iconographic and influential on subsequent silent cinema, including American cinema,” Thompson said.

Speaking with the Associated Press last year to promote his adaptation of “Nosferatu” (the original vampire tale was also made by Murnau, in 1922), Robert Eggers testified to the ways in which “Faust” has influenced him as a director.

“Filmmaking — it didn’t really get better than that,” he said.

Murnau’s “Faust” follows its titular protagonist, a faithful alchemist who despairs over a deadly, seemingly unstoppable plague. He eventually meets the demon Mephisto — legend often refers to him as Mephistopheles — who convinces Faust to do a trial-run pact to renounce God in exchange for the power to help the infirm village.

But Faust’s demonic deal is found out when a crowd realizes he cannot look upon a cross. Despondent, Faust plans to kill himself, but is stopped by Mephisto, who comes back with another offer: The demon will give the elderly alchemist back his youth.

Origins of the devil’s offer

It’s unclear when exactly the idea that humans could strike a deal with the demonic materialized, according to Joseph Laycock, a professor of religion who studies Satanism and demonic belief at Texas State University.

The idea that a powerful supernatural being could grant wishes or help humans exists in pre-Islamic Arabic traditions, but most Western depictions of this kind of myth borrow from Christian theology.

“Humans and demons each have something the other wants. We want this power. We want control over the natural world. The demons have it and we don’t. But the demons want our souls,” Laycock said. “The Faust legend is kind of ready to be told as soon as this Christian demonology emerges.”

One clue into the origins of a Satanic bargain lies within the “Malleus Maleficarum,” often translated as the “Hammer of Witches,” a 15th century German Catholic theological text on demonology.

In it, God has limited Satan’s power, Laycock explained. But, “there’s this loophole. And the loophole is, if a demon makes a pact with a human, the demon gets to do all the stuff it couldn’t normally do.”

This period around the Reformation was a “golden age” for possession, exorcism and witch-hunting in Europe, Laycock said, which sets the stage for the Faust legend to materialize.

In the 1800s, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe adapted the Faust story into a two-part tragic play, converting the German legend into a literary giant that would have tremendous influence on the Western world, Thompson argues.

She compares Goethe’s cinematic influence to works from Shakespeare and stories like “Sherlock Holmes,” which have also been repeatedly retold. “Canonical works of literature in different languages are adapted over and over again,” she said.

Fauria writes for the Associated Press. Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc.