Sinners

dir: Ryan Coogler

2025.

Damn. I really wanted to love this flick, like really love it. As it stands, or at least after one viewing, I like it but wonder what else could have been done instead, how it could have gone in a different direction.

The setup is immaculate, the look of the film is sublime. The cinematography by Autumn Durald Arkapaw is so perfect you wish you could frame countless scenes, countless images, on the walls or screensaver of your mind. The acting is spot on as well. If you like Michael B. Jordan, you’re lucky enough to get two performances, as he plays twins Elijah and Elias Moore, better known as hardened veterans and crims Smoke and Stack. They are identical except for the fact that one wears a red hat and the other wears a blue cap.

If you don’t like Michael B. Jordan, then there’s twice as much of him to dislike, and you’re also probably the kind of jerk that doesn’t even know what D’Angelo screaming “Where’s Wallace?” means.

I despair for you and sigh despondently in your general direction.

They are both fierce, and fairly quick to violence. I will admit to not knowing which one was which much of the time, and then there’s a fight between them towards the end and I was like “which one do I want to win again?”

The brothers have returned from Chicago, having worked in the crime mines created by Prohibition, now with a bunch of Irish beer, Italian wine and oodles of money at their disposal. Back to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to do what they’ve always wanted to do which is to run their own juke joint.

A place catering entirely to a Black clientele, in the 1930s, at a time when the children and grand-children of the losing side of the Civil War still think they’ve got a chance of re-litigating the argument, so to speak. When they hand over the cash for the sawmill, the constantly spitting owner gives no indication that this arrangement has any permanency. When the twins solemnly intone that if they see a single Klansman set foot on the grounds of their new property, they’ll be promptly shot.

“There’s no Klan here” smiles the guy, clearly the Grand Octopus or Pulsating Rectum or whatever the head honcho of the Klan hereabouts is called. I have to admit, both because I’m such a nerd, and because I’m also a despicable bureaucrat that every government tries to get its populace to resent, what with our stylish cardigans and countless elitist perks like tap water and workspaces where you can never open a window, all I could think of during this scene was “how are you genius twins going to prove you purchased the property legally? Where’s the title? Who’s doing the conveyancing?”

But I am reasonably assured that most other people don’t think like that, so it probably wasn’t an important sticking point for anyone but me. So much for trying to make points of universal significance in my reviews, eh?

I love the way the first hour plays out, because the twins are reintroducing themselves to a whole bunch of people they know (that we don’t), they’re sharing their plan of opening the juke joint that very night, they’re getting everyone on board however reluctantly by flashing their ill-gotten gains, and yet everything seems to be coming together nicely. It’s an interesting parallel to the opening hour of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and every heist film ever made.

Along for at least half of the ride is their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), who’s pretty young, but enormously talented. No-one, absolutely no-one calls him “Preacher Boy”, but he claims his nickname is, you guessed it, “Preacher Boy” because his father is a pastor. But he’s not only a pastor, and brother to the twin’s deceased father, but something of a hellfire and brimstone preacher who thinks almost anything is a tool of the devil. He urges his son to turn away from music, to turn away from evil, but where would be the fun in that?

Smoke, I think, reconnects with Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), but it’s not a happy reunion, since what they share is a child that did not live past infancy. And they fight over whether she has so-called hoodoo powers of protection, as he says he’s been all over the world and survived wars and seen no evidence for the supernatural, though much in the way of death, and she asks him how he thinks he survived all that and yet stands before her with both his eyes and the correct number of limbs intact.

I am guessing we will be revisiting this argument later on. Though there is sorrow there, there’s clearly love / lust there as well.

Stack’s pursued by a girl who could pass for white (Hailee Steinfeld) from their past and there’s clearly bad blood there too, but in this flick everybody has to fuck somebody, so I guess there are inexorable forces both pushing them together and repelling them as well.

Stack and Sammie pick up an old drunk of a bluesman at the station, promising him more booze if he comes and plays at their place. He is called Delta Slim (of course), and is played by Delroy Lindo in such a way that, honestly, if you know who Delroy Lindo is you know exactly the way he’s going to play it: Big. Bigger than big. He’s going to chew so much scenery that they’ll be nothing left once the actual monsters turn up.

Oh yeah, how long can you talk about a vampire movie without mentioning the vampires?

I think I can go a bit longer. Maybe it’s implausible that you could get something like this together (the big night at the newly commissioned juke joint, I mean) in such a short space of time, but money makes things happen, as we’ve seen. That’s another reason why the twins need the night to be so successful, because of the massive outlay. That’s why they need almost anyone and everyone to come.

Except white people. White people, even the Irish, represent too much of a risk. If someone accidentally stepped on a white person’s foot, or actually brushed against a white woman’s shoulder, or gods forbid looked at them funny, perhaps it would be used as a pretext by the authorities to burn the place to the ground and lynch a bunch of people. That is the setting. That is the timeframe. Before even anything weird or supernatural happens, allowing three seemingly harmless Irish sounding people represents too much of a risk to the safety of the Black people within, not just the owners.

But we know the Irish are a danger to everyone. Not because they’re Irish, and none of them are even drunk. And they play their fiddles all nice and sing nicely. It’s the leader, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), whose eyes flash red and whose teeth seem dangerous even for an Irish musician not called Shane MacGowan. We’ve also seen him flee from some first nations people (Choctaw vampire hunters?), and hole up with some KKK kouple in their shack. And kill them, but only for a while.

It’s the strangest thing, that the other two people with him later on, also unfailingly polite, also asking ever so politely to be invited in to the juke joint, seem to share one consciousness. Is it a hive mind, are they all just thralls to his will, I have no idea. But they want something, and they’re not going to go away of their own accord.

At first you think, once the night starts jumping, that the point is, the success of the endeavour, will be whether enough people turn up, have a great time, spend big, and make the twins and all their hangers-on rich. But that’s a false metric. The twins fight over whether to allow people to spend plantation coins, which aren’t legal tender, or only real money. Despite the fact that slavery has legally been gone for decades, many of these sharecroppers don’t get paid in real money, just in a form of Monopoly money that they can only spend on the plantations where they work.

It's almost like white people can’t bring themselves to ever pay for the labour of Black workers out of habit. But then when the twins are fighting about it, one side thinks these labourers have earned the right to listen to music, drink a bit and dance, and the other side believes “fuck you, pay me” is the only way to run a business.

Who is to say who’s right? Well, I have to say, as a film about two entrepreneurs trying to launch and sustain their dream business, their efforts amount to nothing and their business is an absolute disaster. And I’m not even talking about the fact that the vast majority of their customers are killed and turned into vampires, and then killed again.

I mean, that’s not going to result in positive word of mouth or repeat business. Who wants to return to a place where that many people were killed? Imagine the ratings the place would get: “did not appreciate being violently attacked, turned, and then staked through the heart. Music was pretty good though but nah zero stars”.

Out of the epic failure of their business model, do the brothers, cousin, preacher, Irish people, Chinese American shopkeepers, hoodoo practitioners or golddiggers passing for white learn anything about the folly of their ways, and what they should have done different?

Well, no, frankly. They don’t learn squat, but that’s mostly because so few of them survive. I guess they put everything down to bad luck or the misfortune of being confronted by a ruthless force of unnatural nature, like a tornado with fangs, or a dragon with acid breath – they didn’t know what was coming, and only figured out too late how to protect themselves.

Still, when you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Everything up to when the vampires start going spare works for me. Apart from how great so many individual scenes are, many of which involve people fucking (sorry, it’s just that kind of horny, violent movie) the build up is great, organic, controlled yet feral. Once things turn to shit, and our heroes are under siege, well…

But let us celebrate the good parts more before the lamentations begin. The famous scene that every critic has raved about is kind of amazing. Sammie’s guitar and voice create a spell so sublime it reaches both backwards and forwards in time, uniting ancestors and descendants, across cultures (though not the Irish, pointedly) linking the depths of the blues connecting to an Eddie Hazel-like Funkadelic performer or a dancer in the classical Chinese opera or a Brooklyn DJ or a tribal dancer from the motherland. Yeah, I got it, and probably didn’t need Delroy Lindo explaining it all explicitly, but it’s easily one of the scenes of the year, any year, really.

Sammie is the heart and soul of the flick, and even gets to find himself the Rose – Jack, Kyle Reese – Sarah Conner of his Titanic-Terminator-like one night romance, with a married woman no less, but damn if that doesn’t just make everything hotter. She, being Pearline (Jayme Lawson), is a bit of a force of nature herself, and they have the sweetest time together until…

There is, like, or at least it bugged me how the trigger is pulled for the final battle. Our Heroes know the vampires can’t get them unless they’re invited in, the vampires keep waiting outside, spinning their wheels, Riverdancing as the mood takes them, so someone has to be tricked into inviting them in and killing everyone, unable to wait fifteen minutes for the sun to come up, they’re just that overwrought. And that person pays the price, for love, for vengeance, but everyone else has to as well.

I didn’t love the grand guignol orgy of violence at the end as much as I thought I would, nor do I think it was staged as well as it could have been, and seeing the inevitable victory, well, it was a fair bit cheesy for me.

And then there’s another kind of ending, again calculated to both tug heartstrings and deliver righteous vengeance, and that fell flat for me kinda as well.

And there’s another ending after that, which I won’t completely spoil, and while it raises more questions that it answers, especially being “why would you wear a Cosby sweater without a gun pointed at your head?”, it was great seeing blues legend Buddy Guy in a small but important role.

It’s pretty good. I liked it a lot. I don’t think it’s the absolute stone cold classic that many are making it out to be, but it’s pretty strong. There is something weird going on in the flick from a sexual perspective, but at least it’s not gross from like a sexist or demeaning perspective (though there is a scene I found flat out gross, and, yeah, that’s just a me thing – that whole spitting in people’s mouths thing horrifies me).

Maybe I’ll like it more upon subsequent viewings. It’s very well crafted, well put together.

7 times this is definitely not fun for the whole family out of 10

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“See, white folks, they like the blues just fine. They just don't like the people who make it” – there may be something to your words, old drunken bluesman - Sinners

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2383464729/