On a plane back from Puerto Vallarta with two hours until L.A.X., I decided to give mOdErN cInEmA another chance. A friend recommended Sinners, starring Michael B. Jordan. So, I watched it.
What did I have to lose?
The movie outlasted the flight and I had to finish it at home. That bloated runtime was my first red flag.
Sinners is a movie that takes place in the 1930s in Mississippi. It’s about two twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, both played by Michael B. Jordan, who return from Chicago with a lot of cash to start their juke club that they purchased from a Klan member. The Twins plan to hold a party for the Black folk of The Delta, the name of the area in that specific region of Mississippi.
They recruit some people to get their club off the ground, including their young nephew, Sammie Moore, played by Miles Caton, who is a talented guitarist and blues singer.
While they get the party ready, in another part of The Delta, something runs askew as Klan members are attacked by a nefarious entity and are converted into vampires. The vampires operate as a hive mind, and they are after a certain power that allows one to go beyond the veil between life and death, past and future, to commune with spirits of other musicians or ancestors.
That is when they discover the Twins’ juke party, and are drawn to Sammie’s performance because his playing and singing possesses that power. The rest of the night becomes one hell of a party of survival.
WARNING: MILD-TO-MODERATE SPOILERS AHEAD
Unfortunately, to explain the problems with the film, I have to discuss some plot points. Please read with caution.
You would think a simple and fun concept wouldn’t be so drawn out. But it is. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me, because the length is linked to the flaw of the film.
What is the flaw?
The major flaw is the message: Black Americans are the sole founders of culture while White Americans are the parasites preying on it.
The film offers not one redeemable White character – not even Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) who was raised in the Black Southern culture yet despises her own white skin.
Meanwhile, vampires are associated with the KKK as they turn a local Klan couple into one of their own. The Klan itself has an important part toward the end of the film that makes a point about the hate group.
In fighting racism, Sinners replaces it with another. It’s heavy-handed without nuance or satire and is grievance-mongering, which exhausts the viewer and inflates the runtime.
Moving away from that deeper, heavier flaw, I’ll discuss the other, more mechanical and material flaws in the film.
Although I like the idea of music or an artistic medium transcending space and time, I dislike the way it was executed.
There’s a chaotic scene in the film that was way out of order and just took me out of it. It’s the scene where Sammie performs, everyone dances, and it shows a collage of ancient African shamans of the past chanting along with modern Black artists of rock and hip-hop, followed by women twerking and a Chinese ballet. It was like watching an overstimulating TikTok montage, and just as degenerating.
I DO NOT need to see a juxtaposition of blues singers with their authentic and classy blues music, which I enjoyed, followed by some woman twerking next to them. I cannot take the scene seriously.
By the way, everything is on fire while all this is happening, which feels unintentionally à propos.
A better example that handles the beautiful collision of culture comes from Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, where the clashing of cultures feels earned and respected, and not forced.
The concept of vampires feel too familiar as the film is iterative of From Dusk Till Dawn, Salem’s Lot, and I Am Legend.
As much as I like them, I have seen enough vampires and they really don’t add much to the horror aspect for me.
Although I’ll admit, I do appreciate the “cannot enter without invitation” rule that Coogler implements. Credit for that.
But there was a missed opportunity to integrate African and Southern U.S. culture that would’ve been apropos and behooved the film in its Southern Gothic genre.
The missed opportunity was the mention of “haints,” which are ethereal spirits from African and Southern Hoodoo traditions. I thought they could’ve been used as excellent symbols of cultural introduction to the audience who weren’t familiar with them.
Using re-contextualized haints instead of standard European vampires would’ve felt fresh, mysterious, and perfectly suited to the Mississippi Delta’s Southern Gothic atmosphere.
My favorite character in the movie was Delta Slim, played by Delroy Lindo. I LOVED the intro to Slim and the opening dialogue as it shifts from levity, personality, and comedy, only to be followed by gravitas, fatalism, profundity, and lament.
His character is poetic and magnetic like a fallen bard who pours passion into his music despite being in the Jim Crow South.
His character caught my interest, but I was disappointed in his exit from the film. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I will say that it doesn’t do him the justice he deserves.
Editing choices for visuals and audio were the smaller problems I had. There were some scenes that overlapped and confused me, which made me ask, “How did we get here?” I thought it was a flash-forward or a flashback to preparations for the gig, but then I thought it was to implicate astral projecting events that “could’ve been” had not everything gone all to hell.
It threw me off for a moment.
A similar scene occurs where Stack, Slim, and Sammie are in the car and Slim talks about one of his friends who was murdered by a racist mob.
As he’s talking, you can hear sounds of the past in the background, and again it confused me. I thought there was a ruckus on the plane as this was going on until I realized it was historical sounds in the movie.
I would’ve allowed Mr. Lindo to carry on telling his story since he obviously knows how to emote his words with silence in the background. Or they could have added instant cuts of his memories with abrupt sound effects to give it a P.T.S.D. feel to his storytelling.
Those were the main things that bothered me about the film.
Now, believe it or not, I do not hate this film. I like the technical aspects of this film and would like to see better messaging.
To show good faith, here are some praises that I think made this film watchable for me and where I had enough respect to see it to the very end. So, here are the positives.
Michael B. Jordan has an excellent presence in the movie and steals the show. He’s got charisma, he’s got style, and although the twins are similar, he does enough to play out the differences in personality. I’m curious in watching the behind the scenes on how he made the twins work when making the film and would find that interesting.
That first introductory shot of the Twins was cinematic and was parallel to the legendary Peaky Blinders line walk, demonstrating the stage presence these characters possess. It also bears that Southern Mississippian Gothic look with Black American influence. It’s great! I just wished the story carried the same amount of substance as its visuals.
As a fan of history, I have to give praise to the mention of Smoke and Stack being Harlem Hellfighters in the First World War. I would’ve loved a few scenes with their postwar struggle under Jim Crow laws so that our empathy would deepen for them.
The casting was spot on, even for the racist props. I appreciated Mr. Caton’s role as Samuel since he was kind of like the Nick Carraway to the Twins’ Jay Gatsby role. Unlike Tobey Maguire in the latest The Great Gatsby, Caton, an unknown, talented actor is given a chance by Sinners with his parallel role and has the potential of making himself known in the film universe. No doubt he will be recognizable for other projects.
His character draws intrigue as it iterates the legend of Robert Johnson and his supposed, Faustian deal of selling his soul to the devil to become the Godfather of modern, American Rock & Roll. Another element that blends well with the supernatural and the Southern Gothic. But unfortunately, there’s not enough of that element that it is left to be desired.
Speaking of rock and roll legends, I especially loved the music that was sung by Caton and others, when it wasn’t interrupted by chaos. If Mr. Jordan stole the show with his acting, Mr. Caton stole the show with his singing. That passion demonstrated with that juke culture was authentic and it has my full approval and support.
The final positive that I like about the film, and this did not occur to me until the middle of the movie, but I love the actresses in here. I couldn’t keep my eyes off them because of their beauty and they all performed well.
Sinners has strong technical elements that I can praise but has heavy socio-political messaging that hampers it. It is watchable, but exhausting. If the races were flipped, the film would rightly be called racist. But in this context, strangely enough, it gets a pass. The double standard is the major problem.
I do admire the “For us, by us” community turnout from the audience goers, but I wished that energy was focused on stories that celebrate shared cultures, not divided ones. With less messaging, more action, tighter editing, and genuine reconciliation, this Southern Gothic could have been unforgettable.
I really wanted to like this movie, because I love the aesthetics of it. Unfortunately, with its heavy and toxic messaging that holds it down, I cannot, with a clear conscience, give it high praise.
As it stands, Sinners gets a 4/10.
Sources
Simple History: Harlem Hellfighters (World War I)
Actual Justice Warrior: Why EVERYONE Hates Sinners Now