Twin brothers return to their home in the Jim Crow South, only to run
into a greater evil than they could have imagined.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Ryan Coogler
Starring: Michael B. Jordan, Delroy Lindo, Jack O'Connell, Jayme Lawson, Wunmi Mosaku, Omar Benson
Miller, Hailee Steinfeld, Li Jun Li, Lola Kirk
The most famous legend in all of musical lore is that of guitarist Robert
Johnson selling his soul to the devil in exchange for blues greatness.
With Sinners, writer/director Ryan Coogler takes inspiration from
Johnson's story and remixes it as a vampire thriller and a tribute to
popular music's roots in the Delta blues. An alternate title might be "The
House That Honeydripped Blood."
Coogler's regular leading man Michael B. Jordan delivers a dual performance
as "the SmokeStack twins," Smoke and Stack, a pair of identical twin
brothers who have returned to their hometown in the rural Mississippi of 1932 after a
stint in Chicago where they played the Italian and Irish mobs off one another
(one imagines a Yojimbo/Fistful of Dollars-inspired prequel). Loaded with
Italian wine and Irish beer (as an Irishman I can assure you we're not a
people known for our beer production), Smoke and Stack purchase a barn from
a local Klansman and set about turning it into a juke joint that very
night.
Much of the first act follows the classic "getting the band together"
format as Smoke and Stack recruit entertainers in alcoholic bluesman Delta
Slim (a scene-stealing Delroy Lindo), preacher's son and guitar prodigy Sammie (Miles Caton),
and young songstress Pearline (Kayme Lawson), along with voodoo occultist
and cook Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), Chinese-American couple Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bo (Yao) to man the bar, and the burly Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) to keep
unwanted intruders out.
And unwanted intruders certainly do arrive. Remmick (Jack O'Connell), a banjo-picking vampire who at one point seems to have
emigrated from Ireland, appears to fall out of the sky, attracted by the
music of the juke joint. Turning a pair of folk-singing Klan members
(singers Lola Kirke and Peter Dreimanis) into vampires, Remmick heads for the juke joint, hoping
to convert a few more souls, and a classic siege
ensues.
Combining the highlighting of a specific regional flavour of
African-American music with genre thrills, Sinners is a more successful
version of what Robert Altman was trying to achieve with Kansas City.
Coogler leans into the music and the horror so heavily that some viewers
may find the contrast too jarring (at my screening each new musical number
prompted a few fresh walkouts). As a big fan of both American roots music and
horror movies, Sinners is right up my alley, but while I was enthralled by
the film's musical aspect, the horror side left me cold. Sinners plays
like a very good Walter Hill movie (I'm thinking the musical fantasia of
Streets of Fire and Hill's own take on the Robert Johnson legend,
Crossroads) that then morphs into a mediocre John Carpenter siege
thriller, more Ghosts of Mars than Assault on Precinct 13. Coogler calls
back to Carpenter's remake remake of The Thing in a couple of places, but
he lacks Carpenter's ability to create spine-tingling suspense. A sequence
that replaces The Thing's unforgettable blood test set-piece with various parties
eating garlic to prove they're not vampires has none of the tension of its
more skilfully crafted predecessor. Coogler's script struggles to
communicate some of its supernatural ideas, resorting to characters
telling us the sort of vampire lore everyone is familiar with, like a
Batman movie insisting on showing us how Bruce Wayne's parents were
killed for the umpteenth time. A subplot involving the KKK arrives as an afterthought that makes
us wonder if the movie might have worked better if the Klan had been the
main villains rather than the vampires.
While the vampire shtick here is largely old hat, it's certainly
interesting how Coogler uses his vampires to prompt some political and
philosophical musing. Like Black Panther's Killdozer, Remmick is an
antagonist who arguably might be more noble-minded than the nominal
heroes. The film posits Remmick as a socialist leader who wants to build a
multiracial army free of inequality. Sinners suggests that vampires don't
care about skin colour because we all bleed red. But as is often the case
with such figures, Remmick's grand claims of a communal utopia are a myth.
He may welcome people of colour into his undead flock, but ultimately
they're all forced to dance to his tune (quite literally, in a
toe-tapping sequence of vampiric Riverdance). One wonders if Coogler is
aiming a sly dig at Hollywood's transparent obsession with diversity,
where women and filmmakers of colour are forced to settle for the reheated
leftovers of a century of white male industry dominance rather than
being allowed to tell their own stories (with the excellent Creed, Coogler is one of the few filmmakers to actually make something of such constraints). Or could it be Coogler's
reckoning with becoming part of the soulless Marvel machine?
Coogler may not prove himself a master of horror here, but there's some
striking filmmaking on display. Coogler introduces Smoke and Stack with a
simple scene of the twins passing a cigarette back and forth. This small
gesture simultaneously lets us know that there's no point trying to find
the digital seams of a remarkable piece of effects wizardry while also
establishing the tight relationship of two men who have been through
everything together. It's in the musical sequences that Coogler gets to
let loose, turning a blues stomper into a dazzling tribute to the past and
present of African-American music as P-Funk guitarists, b-boys, fly girls
and West African tribesmen all magically materialise on the dancefloor
(one wonders what Coogler might have done with Michael Jackson and Prince
in their heydays).
Though set in 1932, it's the spirit of '70s American cinema that most
inhabits Sinners. It's sexy, sweaty, foul-mouthed and dirty-minded in a
way mainstream American movies haven't been since that unfettered era. In Smoke and
Stack we have the sort of morally ambiguous anti-heroes that made '70s
movies so appealing and challenging, and Jordan is clearly relishing the
chance to play such nuanced characters. There's much to admire here, and
it's a pleasure to see a talented filmmaker given free rein away from the
stifling constraints of franchise filmmaking. It's just a shame that all
these ideas and grand spectacle ultimately end up in service of a derivative vampire thriller.
Sinners is in UK/ROI cinemas
from April 18th.
