"Sinners" 4K Review

A sleeper hit earlier this year was Ryan Coogler's (Creed, Black Panther) Sinners, a Depression-era story mashing up of Deep South Jim Crow business, blues music, Hoodoo, and vampires, because why not? Coogler muse Michael B. Jordan stars in a dual role playing Elijah "Smoke" Moore & his twin Elias "Stack" Moore, collectively referred to as the "Smokestack Twins."

It's 1932 in Clarksdale, Mississippi and the Twins are back after several years working up in Chicago for Mafia families. They've returned with a stack of cash stolen from the Mob and looking to open a juke joint for the local black sharecroppers and laborers who aren't permitted to patronize the white folks establishment.

They buy a former sawmill from Hogwood (David Maldonado), who insists they won't have any trouble from the Klan (spoiler: he's the local Grand Dragon), and then split up to prepare for the opening that night. Smoke goes to town to contract food from the Chinese shopkeeper Bo Chow (Yao) and his wife Grace (Li Jun Li) and to have his estranged wife, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku, Loki), a Hoodoo practitioner. Stack takes their cousin Sammie "Preacher Boy" Moore (newcomer Miles Caton), an aspiring blues guitarist (something his preacher father isn't cool with) with him as he looks to round up talent including Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo, Get Shorty), and Pearline (Jayme Lawson), a married singer whom Sammie is sweet on. Stack also runs into his ex-girlfriend Mary (Hallie Steinfeld, Hawkeye), a "passing" black woman.

 Elsewhere, a man whose skin is smoking runs up to a shack and pounds at the door, begging to be left in. This is Remmick (Jack O'Connell), who tells the wary couple - Bert (Peter Dreimanis) and Joan (Lola Kirke) - he is being chased by Indians for some misunderstanding. They let him in and when the group of Lakota show up asking if they'd seen anyone coming through, deny they have. Next thing, they're vampires, too.

The opening night of the juke seems to be going well except the brothers realize early on that due to the amount of company scrip (currency paid to sharecroppers that's only spendable in company stores) they're accepting, they're not making as much real cash as they need to succeed. Problems escalate when three white folk show up asking to be let in, claiming they'd heard the music and just wanted to join in the festivities as they're musicians too. Mary goes to investigate them and at first sympathizes, then decides they need to be kept out. Unfortunately, she doesn't see Remmick take flight behind her as she walks away, Ruh-roh. Long story short, a vampire gets in, the party breaks up, then a whole lot of vampires want to get in at the few remaining humans inside.

I'm somewhat mystified as to the acclaim and success of Sinners because on one hand it's heavily...let's say "influenced" by the 1996 Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez collaboration From Dusk Till Dawn - which started off as a gritty bank robbers on the run crime film before flipping into a bonkers vampires in a Mexican strip club flick - and on the other it's hobbled by a couple of suspense-breaking storytelling choices which kill most of the suspense.

The first mistake is literally the first scene where we see an injured Sammie arrive at his father's church during a service, clutching the broken remains of a guitar neck, clearly suffering injuries, before jumping back 24 hours in a Scriptnotes Stuart Special. As with all movies told in flashback (e.g. Atomic Blonde, Haywire), if they're present before the flashback, it means they survive whatever happens next.

But the more damaging choice was to show Remmick arrive at Bert's shack and reveal what he. Without that sequence, when the trio arrive at the juke and ask to be invited in, the audience would be suspicious because why are these white folk so eager to hang out with the black folk in the 1932 Jim Crow South? Are they trying to entrap the Smokestack Twins and bring in the Klan? Or are they just friendly Irish musicians seeking to jam? Since we KNOW what they are and why they're casually asking to be invited in, it becomes just a waiting game to see who gets turned when they go out and they gets back in.

As if that's not enough, there is a lengthy coda set 50 years later as a mid-credit scene so if you turn it off when it appears the movies over, you'll miss something important.

As lukewarm as I am in general to Sinners, there is one sequence which stands out and that's when the music is playing and a narration that played over the beginning is recalled about how some musicians have an ability to piece the veil between life and death, the present, past, and future and as Sunnie plays, figures ranging from ancient African tribal musicians and dancers appear as well as what appears to be P-Funk guitarist Jimi Hazel and hip-hop DJs and break dancers as the camera swirls around the scene. Good stuff.

Jordan's performance is OK but suffers from both brothers looking the same other than different colored suits and having generally similar personalities. I couldn't remember who was Smoke and who was Stack and it didn't really matter. Part of my difficulty stems from remembering how Tatiana Maslany created over a dozen different clones for Orphan Black, even playing one imitating another so deftly you felt you were watching an imitation, not just the actor switching to the other characterization. (To be fair, though, if you asked me which Winklevoss twin was which as played by Armie Hammer in The Social Network, I couldn't really tell you when they were more differentiated than Coogler's script defines them.)

 Caton is more layered in his performance as the conflicted young bluesman; it will be interesting to see what he does next. Lindo almost steals every scene he's in and it's good to see him again after somehow missing everything he's done the past 20 years. (This scene in Get Shorty when he discusses screenwriting is gold.) I didn't recognize Mosaku because of how different she looked from her TVA Agent role in Loki and it was good to see her doing something more involving.

 The cinematography by Autumn Durald Arkapaw (Wakanda Forever, The Last Showgirl) is rich, but for home viewing the original IMAX scenes (which only a tiny handful of theaters were able to present) is altered from the original 1.43:1 to the 1.78:1 (16:9) ratio of TVs, alternating from the 2.39:1 widescreen of the majority. Sometimes the transitions are abrupt cuts (a la The Dark Knight), though I spotted at least one slow diminishing of the black bars as used in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (when Katniss enters the arena) and Mission: Impossible - Fallout (the HALO jump and another spot that escapes me now). Compared to the widescreen bulk, the clarity and frame size of the IMAX parts made he wish the whole film was done in fullscreen. 

While Sinners has its moments and strengths, particularly in the performances, I was left with too many questions like how in the segregated South did Chinese people had a general store? Perhaps such things happened, but against the backdrop of Jim Crow it's distracting. But as detailed above, the structural choices Coogler made work against whatever points he wanted to make. Clip out the Remmick scene (or use it as a flashback after the vampire twist happens; perhaps have the Indians show up to save the day) and the racial tensions subtext could've worked more allegorically. 

Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.