Sinners: A Review - Don't Believe the Hype

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. An over-hyped horror movie that under-delivers on every count.

Sinners, written and directed by Ryan Coogler, is a period horror film that chronicles Black twin entrepreneurs, Smoke and Stack, who open a juke joint in the Mississippi Delta in 1932 and contend with racism and vampires…and not necessarily in that order.

Sinners hit theatres on April 18th and was a run-away smash hit. The film was a box office blockbuster, making $350 million on a $90 million budget, was a critical darling, and generated a ton of positive buzz...some of which included Oscar talk.

I missed Sinners in the theatre, but as a fan of vampire movies, Blues music, actresses Hailee Steinfeld, Wunmi Mosaku and actor Delroy Lindo – all of whom have supporting roles in the movie, when the film hit Video on Demand this week, I quickly bought it (for $25 – essentially the price of two theatre tickets) and was excited to watch it and see exactly what all the fuss was about.

Having watched all two-hours and fifteen minutes of Sinners, I regret to inform you dear reader that I am completely at a loss for what all the aforementioned Sinners fuss was about.

Simply said, despite how much I wanted it to be, Sinners is just not a good movie…hell…it isn’t even an entertaining one. It is poorly paced, egregiously shot, incoherently written and at least in terms of its lead Michael B. Jordan, abysmally acted.

The film opens with a long set-up that introduces us to Smoke and Stack, the twins played by Michael B. Jordan. They have returned to Mississippi from Chicago where they worked for Al Capone. They are also combat veterans from World War I.

Smoke and Stack have a pile of money and buy an old lumber mill from a Klansman and turn it into a juke joint. The film takes place on the day they open the juke joint and the whole community (Black community) comes out to party there.

The languid first hour has the distinct pacing of a prestige drama, but it lacks both the prestige and the drama. The film then transitions, slowly…very slowly…into a horror film that is as derivative and dull as imaginable, and as predictable as can be.

The unquestionable highlight of the film is a scintillating music sequence in the juke joint that masterfully connects Delta Blues with African folk music and then to contemporary Black music. It is a visually and musically compelling piece of cinema. What makes that sequence stand out all the more though is that everything surrounding it is so visually unimaginative and aesthetically anemic.

For example, cinematographer Autumn Arkapaw, makes the decision to compose all of her shots exactly the same way, with the main subject smack dab in the middle of the frame. I know this style is en vogue nowadays but that doesn’t make it look any less amateurish and reprehensible. The cinematography in this movie looks like something from a second rate tv show on the USA network.

Another piece of cinematic malpractice is the mismanaged and poorly shot crescendo to the main action battle – which is cinematically obtuse, visually incoherent and dramatically incomprehensible…and a truly absurd and aggressively pandering coda tacked on at the end that only extends this already interminably long and decidedly lifeless movie.

Sinners is not aided in the least by the poor performance from Michael B. Jordan as the two leads. Jordan does next to nothing to differentiate between the twins and does little more than pose and preen his way through the film.

Jordan, who I once thought had such great promise as an actor – most notably in Friday Night Lights and Fruitvale Station, has eschewed acting for “blacting” in his movies now. “Blacting” is a vacuous and vapid form of stereotype incarnation in the place of actual acting among Black actors – and occasionally white ones. When someone “acts”, they create a rich and complex human character, when they are “blacting” they simply do a shallow pantomime of hollow Black stereotypes. Michael B. Jordan does blacting, not acting, in Sinners…as well as in the vast majority of things he’s been in over the last few years.

Jordan’s fall from artistic grace mirrors director Ryan Coogler’s similar precipitous stumble…not surprising since they have teamed up often over the years and both had their breakout with Fruitvale Station.

Coogler garnered much acclaim for Fruitvale Station, which was a film that showed him to be a director bursting with potential. Unfortunately, he has squandered that potential with a series of sub-par franchise films (Creed and Black Panther).

Yes, I know that Black Panther (which also starred Michael B. Jordan) was a blockbuster and got nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award…but I said it at the time and will say it again now…Black Panther is a middling Marvel movie. It just isn’t good…but critics slobbered all over it because it was a “Black movie” that came out at the height of the Trump shitshow (or first incarnation of the Trump shitshow) and all the #OscarSoWhite stuff and the rest of that era’s racial “awakening”.

I wrote about the middling nature of Black Panther when it came out and have only been proven more right as every day passes. That movie too was very poorly shot…and its cinematographer was…you guessed it – Autumn Arkapaw.

Black Panther II, which came out post Trump I and pre-Trump II, was a truly atrocious Marvel movie, and it showed the ever-expanding cracks in the Coogler myth that I astutely diagnosed much earlier on.

Now with Sinners, audiences and critics have been wowed, and I am left shaking my head in dismay, if not disgust. I get people want to be excited about movies again, and want to have a communal cultural experience, but Sinners is not the answer now…just like Top Gun: Maverick wasn’t the answer a few years ago.

Lowering our standards and pretending that Sinners (or Top Gun: Maverick, or Barbie) is a great movie, or even a good one, does no one, not audiences, not critics, not Hollywood and certainly not the art of cinema, any good.

Ryan Coogler’s success, like Jordan Peele’s and Greta Gerwig’s success, is a function of cultural wishful thinking, critical and audience virtue signaling, and a steep lowering of cinematic standards across the boards.

Sinners is a film that has no business making $350 million or of being adored by critics or of garnering Oscar nominations. The film’s success, both with audiences and critics, speaks less to its quality and more to how far both American intelligence and the art of cinema has fallen.

Ultimately, Sinners is the type of movie that dumb people think is deep, and stupid people think is smart. It is an instantly forgettable and entirely frustrating cinematic endeavor and you shouldn’t waste a single second of your precious time on it.

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