Sinners

Vampires really can’t let people have a fun night out on the town, huh?

Set in 1932, Sinners follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordon) as they return to their hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi, to make a name for themselves after years of being away. Fast-tracking the opening night of a new juke joint exclusive to the Black community, Smoke and Stack gather up a crew of friends and acquaintances to help push things along, including the musically talented Sammie (Miles Caton), old timer Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), and Smoke and Stack’s respective estranged lovers Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) and Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), to name a few. But as the night finally kicks off and the liquor starts flowing as freely as the music, it isn’t long before a roving band of vampires hell-bent on making this little corner of Mississippi part of their brood arrives to ruin everyone’s good time. What follows is a harrowing tale about what happens when an ancient evil comes knocking, and the lengths Smoke and Stack will go to ensure the music never stops playing.

More recently stuck making films within the confines of a pre-existing movie universe, i.e., the MCU or Creed, Sinners shows director Ryan Coogler and his team firing on all cylinders as they push their craft to a whole other level. Delivering a film that’s equal parts dramatic, tense, creepy, and fun, Sinners looks great from a lighting and cinematography perspective, and sounds even better with its constant themes of music and effective use of score.

Bolstered by some stellar acting from everyone involved — the usually one-note Michael B. Jordan finally shows his range with his dual Smoke and Stack role, with Hailie Steinfeld and newcomer Miles Caton backing him up by just being plain fun to watch — there’s nary a bad performance in sight, helping audiences immerse themselves in the film’s spot-on 1930s setting. And while much can be said about Sinners’ success on a technical level, the same can’t be said about some of its script and the abundance of head-scratching plot beats woven through it.

Though I enjoyed the slow-burn of the first half of the movie, as soon as it switched to all things vampires, Sinners started to fall off for me. Seeming like two movies crammed into one, Sinners’ script felt unbalanced at times, and consistently became a point of annoyance for me, especially so after seeing how well it handled the character work and drama of its first hour. Turning into a no less enjoyable but still by-the-numbers vampire flick in its second half, the shift from measured storytelling to gory spectacle was disappointing in a way that felt rushed and jarring.

Sure, some scenes capitalize on the film’s vampire lore in effective ways and give audiences some great make-up effects for when things finally do go down, but with stupid character decisions happening throughout the third act as well as diminishing narrative returns the longer things went on, it’s clear that Sinners could have used a little more attention paid in certain spots, or at the very least found a way to blend everything together in a far more even-handed way.

From a filmmaking standpoint, Sinners does a lot right, yet when it comes to telling a balanced story, it falters in ways that I couldn’t always get behind, with my hot take for this one being that it may be a tad overrated in a few respects. But thanks to some fully realized characters, solid acting, spattering of gory violence, and an inherently interesting idea that unfortunately wasn’t explored enough, Sinners is still one of the best original films in recent memory, even if it doesn’t always do what’s necessary to elevate it into something more.