By JAKE COYLE

American society probably puts more pressure on producing a good quarterback than anything else, which makes it all the more confounding that the Jets can never have one.

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OK, OK. So that’s not necessarily the takeaway from “Him,” a new horror thriller about the religious fervor that goes with football. For some of us long-suffering fans, football inspires less Messianic zeal than an annual reminder that this is a dark and cruel world and any delusional preseason hope will be quickly and thoroughly snuffed out.

But Jets fan or not, “Him” has a decent point to make about QB hero worship. These are modern gladiators. But if the issue of some thrillers is that they have nothing to say, the problem with “Him” is that it has exactly one thing to say, which it does again and again and again.

“Him” does have some style, though. Directed by Justin Tipping (“Kicks”) and produced by Jordan Peele, “Him” was made with the potent premise of bringing the kind of dark, satirical perspective that characterizes a Monkeypaw production to our violent national pastime. But that promise gets fumbled in an allegorical chamber play that grows increasingly tedious.

Cameron “Cam” Cade grew up idolizing Saviors quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). As a boy, he watches White win a game on a highlight-reel play that also leaves the QB with a career-threatening injury. “That’s what real men do,” his father (Don Benjamin) tells him. “They make sacrifices.”

Fourteen years later, Cam (Tyriq Withers) is on the cusp of entering the pros as a top draft pick. Just before the combine, though, Cam, while practicing alone at night, is struck in the head by a strange pagan spirit-slash-mascot that emerges out of the shadows. The trauma to the head adds a new risk to Cam’s football playing. But if you’re expecting a horror version of 2015’s “Concussion,” that’s a small part of what “Him” aspires to be about.

The Saviors reach out to Cam’s agent (Tim Heidecker) and offer a unique opportunity: Come to Isaiah’s Texas desert compound to train with him for a week. Isaiah is still in the league and by now, despite the long-ago injury, has gone on to win a Tom Brady-like haul of championships. After a week, the Saviors will decided if they’ll draft Cam.

But what follows over seven days is less a boot camp than a disorienting psychodrama — a kind of football ayahuasca — in which the very intense Isaiah pushes Cam to extremes to test whether he has it in him to be the GOAT. The atmosphere is surreal and the editing hallucinatory. Cam is injected with unknown serums, blood gets transfused and pocket-passing drills turn grisly. This is not a game, Cam is told more than once. To paraphrase Dani Rojas, football is life (and maybe death, too).

By settling the movie into Isaiah’s Brutalist estate, “Him” take what could have been something grander and turns into effectively into a battle for QB1 — albeit one with more primal underpinnings than your average depth-chart contest.

But it’s probably a bad sign for your satire if you have to take reality completely out of it and instead hole up inside a haunted house. There are a few folks around, including Isaiah’s influencer wife (Julia Fox), but somewhere far outside of the frame of “Him” is an enormous football world of arenas, screaming fans and broadcasters — the world that a movie like “Any Given Sunday” rushed to capture, not evade. “Him” ends up feeling like a gladiator movie that forgot the Colosseum.

“Him,” a Universal Pictures release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong bloody violence, language throughout, sexual material, nudity and some drug use. Running time: 96 minutes. One and a half stars out of four.

By KEVIN FREKING, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House on Friday passed a short-term spending bill to extend government funding for seven weeks and avoid a partial government shutdown on Oct. 1, but prospects looked dimmer in the Senate, where the two parties show no signs of budging on the matter.

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The bill would generally continue existing funding levels through Nov. 21. Democratic leaders are adamantly opposed and are threatening a government shutdown if Republicans don’t let them have a say on the measure, as some Democratic support will be needed to get a bill to President Donald Trump’s desk for his signature.

The vote was 217-212.

House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana had few votes to spare as he sought to persuade fellow Republicans to vote for the funding patch, something many in his conference have routinely opposed in past budget fights. But this time, GOP members see a chance to portray the Democrats as responsible for a shutdown.

“We were very careful. We put no partisan measures in this. There’s no poison pills. None of that,” Johnson said leading up to the vote.

In a sign the vote could be close, Trump weighed in, urging House Republicans to pass the bill and put the burden on Democrats to oppose it. GOP leaders often need Trump’s help to win over holdouts on legislation.

“Every House Republican should UNIFY, and VOTE YES!” Trump said on his social media site.

Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said that in opposing the continuing resolution, Democrats were working to protect the health care of the American people. He said that with Republicans controlling the White House and both branches of Congress, “Republicans will own a government shutdown. Period. Full stop.”

The House vote now sends the bill to the Senate where Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said the Senate will vote on the measure along with a dueling Democratic proposal. But neither is expected to win the 60 votes necessary to advance.

Senators could then potentially leave town until Sept. 29 — one day before the shutdown deadline. The Senate has a scheduled recess next week because of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year.

The Democratic proposal would extend enhanced health insurance subsidies set to expire at the end of the year, plus reverse Medicaid cuts that were included in Republicans’ big tax breaks and spending cuts bill enacted earlier this year.

“The American people will look at what Republicans are doing, look at what Democrats are doing, and it will be clear that public sentiment will be on our side,” said Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, who has repeatedly threatened a shutdown if health care isn’t addressed.

Democrats on both sides of the Capitol are watching Schumer closely after his last-minute decision in March to vote with Republicans to keep the government open. Schumer argued then that a shutdown would be damaging and would give Trump and his White House freedom to make more government cuts. Many on the left revolted, with some advocates calling for his resignation.

The vote in the spring also caused a temporary schism with Jeffries, who opposed that particular GOP spending bill and said he would not be “complicit” with Schumer’s vote.

The two Democratic leaders now say they are united, and Schumer says things have changed since March. The public is more wary of Trump and Republicans, Schumer says, after the passage of Medicaid cuts.

Most Democrats appear to be backing Schumer’s demand that there be negotiations on the bill — and support his threats of a shutdown, even as it is unclear how they would get out of it.

“Look, the president said really boldly, don’t even talk to Democrats. Unless he’s forgotten that you need a supermajority to pass a budget in the Senate, that’s obviously his signal he wants a shutdown,” said Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis.

While the Democratic measure to fund the government has no chance of passage Friday, it does give Democrats a way to show voters their focus on cutting health care costs.

“There are some thing we have to address. The health insurance, ACA, is going to hammer millions of people in the country, including in red states,” said Sen. Angus King, I-Maine. “To me, that can’t be put off.”

Republicans say the blame would be clearly on the other side if they can’t pass a bill — and are using Schumer’s previous arguments against shutdowns against him.

Sen. John Barrasso, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, said: “Senator Schumer himself said that passing a clean CR will avert a harmful and unnecessary shutdown. Now he wants to cause a harmful and unnecessary shutdown.”

Associated Press writer Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

LEAVENWORTH, Wash. (AP) — Authorities say they have found remains they believe are Travis Decker, an ex-soldier wanted in the deaths of his three daughters, in the mountains of Washington state.

The Chelan County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement Thursday that it was processing the site with the help of the Washington State Patrol crime scene response team. They will follow up with DNA analysis, it said.

“While positive identification has not yet been confirmed, preliminary findings suggest the remains belong to Travis Decker,” the statement said.

Decker, 32, has been wanted since June 2, when a sheriff’s deputy found his truck and the bodies of his three daughters — 9-year-old Paityn Decker, 8-year-old Evelyn Decker and 5-year-old Olivia Decker — at a campground outside Leavenworth.

Three days earlier he failed to return the girls to their mother’s home in Wenatchee, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) east of Seattle, following a scheduled visit.

Decker was an infantryman in the Army from March 2013 to July 2021 and deployed to Afghanistan for four months in 2014. He had training in navigation, survival and other skills, authorities said, and once spent more than two months living in the backwoods off the grid.

More than 100 officials with an array of state and federal agencies searched hundreds of square miles, much of it mountainous and remote, by land, water and air during the on and off search. The U.S. Marshals Service offered a reward of up to $20,000 for information leading to his capture.

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Last September, Decker’s ex-wife, Whitney Decker, wrote in a petition to modify their parenting plan that his mental health issues had worsened and that he had become increasingly unstable. He was often living out of his truck, and she sought to restrict him from having overnight visits with their daughters until he found housing.

An autopsy determined the girls’ cause of death to be suffocation, the sheriff’s office said. They had been bound with zip ties and had plastic bags placed over their heads.

By LINDSEY BAHR, Associated Press

On Nov. 8, 2018, the day one of the deadliest wildfires in U.S. history burned the town of Paradise, California, and killed 85 people, a school bus driver was sent to pick up 22 elementary school students to take them to safety. The Camp Fire was quickly spreading, communications were down and what was supposed to be a straightforward mission turned into a harrowing five-hour ordeal.

It’s these events that are dramatized in “The Lost Bus,” which opens in select theaters Friday before streaming on Apple TV+ on Oct. 3. Turning a recent, real-life tragedy (even the heartwarming stories that emerge from the ashes) into Hollywood entertainment requires a deft touch. Lean too far into the melodrama, and it risks resembling a made-for-TV movie. Keep it too clinical and it becomes a news segment.

But filmmaker Paul Greengrass, who has thrilled audiences with his Jason Bourne movies, taken them inside the Maersk Alabama hijacking and United flight 93, effectively toes that line. In “The Lost Bus,” he and co-screenwriter Brad Ingelsby have made an old-fashioned disaster movie that is captivating, frightening and startlingly moving.

Matthew McConaughey plays that bus driver, Kevin, who is having a very bad day already. His dog is terminal, he’s got bills he can’t pay, he’s taking care of his elderly mother in the months after his estranged father died and he’s just had an awful fight with his teenage son (a small, but effective performance from McConaughey’s actual son Levi).

This image released by Apple TV+ shows filmmaker Paul Greengrass, center, during the filming of “The Lost Bus.” (Apple TV+ via AP)

Kevin just can’t seem to catch a break and is feeling sorry for himself, dealing with his boss, annoyed calls from his ex-wife and a teenager who woke up with a bad fever. Then he starts noticing the plumes of smoke in the distance. He’s on his way to deliver medicine to his son when the call comes in over the radio: Is any bus driver in the area available to deliver 22 children to a safe location? You can feel the agony, and slight annoyance, as Kevin waits for a beat hoping in vain that someone else is available.

Greengrass and Ingelsby smartly interweave Kevin’s lousy morning with the beginnings of the fire, showing the methodology of the competent first responders attempting to manage a situation that is quickly spiraling out of control. Greengrass sustains a feeling of dread for the duration of the film, a white-knuckle experience that only gets more stressful when the children are added to the equation.

When Kevin gets to the school, he’s not in any mood to gently walk the scared kids through this situation gently, insisting that a teacher, Mary ( America Ferrera ) come along for the ride to handle them. Kevin is not a likely hero. He’s barely even a reluctant one. He’s simply a down-on-his-luck guy who showed up and, ultimately, did something extraordinary.

This isn’t a superhero story, however he is treated with more empathy than, say, Tom Cruise’s bad dad in “War of the Worlds.” There is an interesting thread woven into the story about absentee dads and regret, that extends even beyond Kevin, his late father and his son.

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Watching Ferrara and McConaughey drive this school bus through the flames and collapsing power cables sometimes brings “Speed” to mind. Occasionally, it veers a bit too far into spectacle and you start to question just how much the action has been upped for audience excitement. Perhaps these things really did unfold as they’re presented, but at times it feels like you’re suddenly on the Universal Studio Tour.

Still, it’s impossible to take your eyes off the screen, away from the inferno and the sense of our own smallness and helplessness to “battle it,” whatever that is supposed to mean. There is certainly a version of this story, adapted from Lizzie Johnson’s novel “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire,” that could have focused on the firefighters. They do get a spotlight here, and the fire chief gets to say that these burns are only getting worse every year. But if you’re looking for that movie, perhaps you should turn to Joseph Kosinski’s “Only the Brave.”

“The Lost Bus” is about a few ordinary people in an impossible situation just trying to survive. While it’s not hard to wring emotion out of an audience watching kids in peril, it also, in some ways, gets right to the very heart of the matter.

“The Lost Bus,” an Apple Original Films release in select theaters Sept. 19 and streaming on Apple TV+ on Oct. 3, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for “language.” Running time: 129 minutes. Three stars out of four.