Review: "Sinners"

The heavily promoted, long awaited movie Sinners is finally here.  The trailers were eye-popping.  Audiences were salivating.

And as for the movie?

For starters, it’s another collaboration between Oscar-nominated director Ryan Coogler and rising star actor Michael B. Jordan.  Previously, their work together includes the box office blockbusters Creed (2015), Black Panther (2018) and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022).  It’s an impressive, shared resume.

The announcement that they would be teaming up again set the industry abuzz, and rightfully so.  The supporting cast included Miles Caton, Sau Williams and Adrene Ward-Hammond.  Recently, it was revealed that blues guitar legend Buddy Guy also had a surprise cameo appearance in the film.

Music is a main ingredient in Sinners, set in 1932 amid the cotton fields of Clarksdale, Mississippi.  Music establishes the time frame and sets the tone for a movie that explores the mysterious power of music, suggesting that it can connect people both living and dead. 

In that sense, the power is both good and bad.  It can unite people in joyous celebration and also summon dark spirits and demons that are best left alone.  As one character warns, when you dance with the Devil, he might follow you home.

Sinners is essentially two movies rolled into one.  The first hour tells the story of two identical twins, Smoke and Stack (both played very convincingly by Michael B. Jordan).

Returning from the battlefields of World War I, the enterprising brothers take up residence in Capone-era, gangland Chicago where they earn a small fortune.It’s a Blues-Era, Prohibition-Era tale that Hollywood has told countless times over the years dating back to the earliest classic Warner Brothers gangster movies in the 1930s.  Not surprisingly, Sinners was produced by Warner.

When the brothers move back home to Mississippi, their plan is to invest their money in a juke joint dance club for the local black patrons.  It’s a world of racial tension in a Southern community that includes members of the KKK.  Getting the club up and running is an uphill battle. 

There are issues recruiting the staff and personal issues involving ex-girlfriends and wives.  Things get complicated.

There is enough going on with this gangster-themed plot line for an entire movie, but Sinners takes a well-publicized turn (shown in the trailers—no spoilers) that thrusts it into a whole other direction when it is revealed that some of the local rednecks are horrifying vampires, intent on drinking the patrons of the club dry.

The second half of Sinners morphs into a movie about the undead and all the standard plot details that go along with that -- mere bullets can’t stop them, it is necessary to plunge a wooden stake into their hearts to put them down.  Garlic is a litmus test for identifying vampires, as we’ve seen in countless films. 

The interesting detail here is that vampires must be invited into a building before they can enter.  It becomes the source of major suspense, played to the max in the screenplay.

As glimpsed in the trailers there is a good deal of well-choreographed fighting, copious biting and thick pools of blood.  Several of the causalities are heartbreaking. 

Sinners goes from gangster movie to gore fest, jumping film genres in an attempt to create a new formula. The concept isn’t new.  Vampire films have been expanded in many ways over the years.  Comedy is one example, dating back to Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967).  There are many others.

The mix of gangsters and vampires isn’t necessarily a bad idea (though even that has been explored in movies like the John Landis film Innocent Blood (1992).  The problem with Sinners is that both halves of the movie suffer from a sluggish pace and long run time (2 hours 17 minutes).  The stylishness of the images and music can’t make up for a script that needed some streamlining, and a film edit that could have used some trimming.

Sinners feels like it is struggling to find narrative balance and direction.  The addition of blues great Buddy Guy at the end is overdone and anticlimactic, as is the short, add-on flashback that follows the final credits.  It’s a movie that doesn’t know how or when to quit.

Speaking of sinners and sins, I recall a quote posted on the door of Professor Ray Fielding’s office in the Communications Department of Temple University back when I was a doctoral student.  It was a famous quote from director Frank Capra that read: “There are no rules in filmmaking, only sins.  And the cardinal sin is dullness.”

Sometimes less is more.