“You keep dancing with the Devil, one day he’s gonna follow you home.”
Sinners is a horror movie written and directed by Ryan Coogler (Creed, Black Panther) in which twin brothers – both played by Michael B. Jordan – return to their Mississippi hometown during the Great Depression. The “Smokestack Twins” (one nicknamed Smoke and the other Stack) are WWI veterans who got involved in organized crime up in Chicago. Now they intend to use their ill-gotten loot to buy a disused mill and turn it into a juke joint. Accompanying them is their young cousin Sammie “Preacher Boy” Moore (played by Miles Canton), the son of a hellfire-and-brimstone pastor who dreams of becoming a blues musician. There’s only one problem with this plan: this is a horror movie. A vampire (Jack O’Connell) arrives, and the juke joint’s opening night gets unpleasantly fang-intensive.
This review will be divided into spoiler-free and spoiler-filled sections. Sinners is rated R for violence, profanity, and sexual content; don’t take the kids to this.
Spoiler Free
As befits a movie about delta blues in the 1930s, the music in this film is top notch. Miles Canton is phenomenally talented, with a voice perfectly-suited to the style of music in display (Here is Canton performing “Travelin’” in the movie soundtrack. I was stunned when he broke into that number; no 20-year-old should have a singing voice like that without having made a deal at a crossroads at midnight). Blues legend Buddy Guy makes an appearance at the end of the movie, providing another impressive performance.
The vampire is an Irish immigrant, and brings some musical chops of his own (Here is the vampire and his crew doing “The Rocky Road to Dublin.” I’m trying not to do spoilers here, but this was an absolutely chilling scene).
In my opinion, the music was the best part of the film. Some reviewers have compared this movie to O Brother, Where Art Thou, and like “O Bro,” the soundtrack to Sinners might be worth buying even if you don’t see the film.
While the music might be the best part of the film, and worth the price of admission, sadly the rest of it did not deliver at the same level. The gore was standard, neither blowing me away nor disappointing. The action was also standard. There were a couple of humorous moments, but they were nothing special. A lot about the vampires was left unanswered, but not in a way that suggested a deeper mystery.
The biggest drawback to this film, as I see it, is the failure to develop and pay off the themes that were worked into the movie. The use of horror to explore social issues has a long and glorious tradition, whether it be zombies, vampires, or gremlins bringing the pain. With the 2017 film Get Out, Jordan Peele gave us a brilliant and symbol-dense look at racism that works at multiple levels and rewards repeat viewings. Sinners appears to be an attempt at something similar, but the film’s message never really coheres (I will go into detail below the spoiler line). Themes and ideas are introduced, but do not seem to go anywhere.
Keep in mind that, no matter how harsh my criticism gets, Sinners is still head and shoulders above the vast majority of garbage being churned out by Hollywood lately. If Sinners had been nothing more than a monster movie (Vampires threaten the characters; will they survive until daybreak?), I would be here singing its praises. But the movie looked like an attempt to say something important, and at that it does not succeed. This was no Get Out (It wasn’t even a Nope).
Spoilers Below
Continuing my primary criticism, Sinners introduces ideas and themes that could have elevated the film to something deeper and more meaningful than other vampire films. And I got the impression that this was the filmmaker’s intent. But the movie never seemed to know what it was saying.
Racism was a prominent theme, but the vampires had no real connection to broader issues of racism. In anything, it might have undermined its own message, in that the only time we see real harmony and friendship between Black and White and Asian people was when they had all been assimilated into the vampire hive-mind. What was that supposed to tell us? The fact that two of the vampire’s recruits were Klan members didn’t go anywhere, and the Klan coming to ambush the club at the end of the movie had no real connection to the rest of the plot, making Smoke’s death pointless. Mary being (if I did the math correctly) one-eighth Black, but entirely White in appearance, but with strong relational and emotional ties to the local Black community, was an opportunity to say something, but nothing really got said. And really, how can you have a character like her in a movie about blood-drinkers and not play the “One Drop Rule” for all its worth?
The love between Smoke and Stack was front and center. But if the point of the movie was the strength of a brother’s love, we should have seen that love serving some kind of redemptive or salvific function. But we didn’t. The closest we got was that, in the end, the living brother and the vampire brother could not kill each other. They could kill everybody else (Smoke could even mercy-kill Annie), just not each other.
The power of music to unite everyone – even across space and time and life and death – was a prominent theme, and Sammy clearly had a powerful gift. But the uniting power of music did not defeat the vampires. It looked like we were being set up for a Battle of the Bands with the blues locked in combat with Irish jigs, but then we got nothing. The vampire says at one point that he wants Sammy so that he can reunite with his ancient ancestors through Sammy’s power, biut that went nowhere as well. Sammy summoned spirits from those who have come before and who come after for a show-stopping musical number, but that was all the spirits did. When Sammy hit the vampire with his guitar, it wasn’t even the power of the instrument as a tool of music that did damage; it was the silver in one of the components. The vampire was not defeated by the power of music; just the power of El Kabong.
Speaking of Sammy, it seemed at some parts like the movie was about a youngster’s loss of innocence. Sammy, initially naive, sees a little bit of the dark side of the music world, has a sexual experience (his first?) with a married woman, watches his heroes fall, and is forced by his father to choose between God and the blues. But if that was the point of the movie, it was underdone as well, even with Buddy Guy’s help.
I could go on about the many minor ideas that went nowhere as well (alcoholism, the vampire’s remarks about Christianity, whatever was going on with the Choctaw, etc.), but you get the idea. While were were shotgunned with ideas and references that had a lot of potential, none hit with any kind of depth. This was a movie that tried to be about something, but in the end was not.
My upcoming novel Student of Blood (Book Two in the Professor Howard Chronicles) features vampires, and I recently published my review of Nosferatu, so I clearly have vampires on the brain.
What do you think? Am I way off base in this review? Should I be more charitable in my view of Sinners? Let me know in the comments below.