Review: Ryan Coogler's "Sinners"

I Suppose I've Waited Long Enough

My grandmother two years before her death at age 100

If you read my previous “stacks” about the must-see movie of each year starting in 2000, you already know this one made the list for this year. You also already know I had issues with it, although I merely touched on the most pressing ones, mainly its fantastical portrayal of the loving acceptance of biracial people who could “pass for white.” I will repeat those issues in the appropriate spot but this is going to be a comprehensive overview of the movie’s themes and scenes, such as they are.

Before I begin, allow me to impart a little disclaimer. I am mixed. My grandmother would have been around the age of the Hailee Steinfeld character, and she could also pass for white, as can I. She lived in the Deep South during the Jim Crow Era and it is a miracle she made it out in one piece since both whites and blacks seemed hellbent on preventing her from doing so. I am not some suburbanite white dude named Connor or Caden who can’t relate to Coogler’s film. So do yourselves a favor and come with something better and more accurate if you’re going to tell me I didn’t get what I was watching.

Disclaimer over. Let’s get to it:

The Plot: Coogler’s film takes place in 1932 Mississippi during the Great Depression and Jim Crow. Twin brothers Smoke and Stack (yes, their names are incredibly stupid-sounding but it was all so he could call them the Smokestack Brothers as if that was any better) have returned from being Al Capone-affiliated gangsters in Chicago with stolen money they plan to use in order to open up a juke joint in their hometown. We’re supposed to see these two as clever, Stack in particular, but anybody who robbed from both the Italian and Irish mobs is most likely a moron. Too bad the movie never follows up on the consequences of this because it’s too concerned with corny vampire stuff. More on that later.

The Concept: Coogler’s intent here is to spin a yarn involving Southern folklore, racism, loss, lust, music, and what waits beyond the veil of reality. It’s a lot to stuff into one two-hour long movie and even a more experienced director might have struggled to make it work. This is Coogler’s fifth feature and he is not at that level yet. I also feel he lacks the intellect to weave those disparate elements into a worthwhile story. The result is an uneven, well-intentioned mess that’s often unintentionally funny rather than riveting.

The Story: Here’s where things get really interesting by which I mean not very interesting at all. Smoke and Stack (I feel like I’m losing IQ points every time I type their names) successfully purchase a building from a Ku Klux Klan-affiliated white man with whom they have a brief, tense moment before he leaves with money in hand. From this point onward, the twins separate so Michael B. Jordan doesn’t have to act against himself for a while. Smoke goes to see his deceased baby’s mom in a scene that was actually so effective and touching, I wondered where the hell it came from. We also never get anything like it again.
Meanwhile, Stack is on a mission with their cousin Sammy the blues guitarist to recruit musicians and workers for the venue. He runs into his former special ladyfriend Mary (Steinfeld) who gets mistaken for a white woman despite looking very Filipino to me but it’s 1932 so…
It turns out Stack sent her away to be with some white guy for “Safety” but she’s back for her mother’s funeral. We can assume mom was black because, unlike nowadays, it was more common for the white parent to be male since, you know, the whole rape accusation thing white women loved to use whenever they got caught satisfying their desires.
Anyway, with all the players assembled, the juke joint is ready to open as the entire town’s black residents descend on it for a good time, the end.
Syke!
It would be the end except for the sudden, jarring, poorly foreshadowed arrival of an Irish vampire and his recent victims who were apparently affiliated with the white man who sold the twins the venue because he’s a Grand Dragon. But the Daddy vampire thinks the Klan sucks and wants everybody to get along. You still with me? I’ve grown used to Coogler’s apparent ineptitude when it comes to smooth narrative flow but this movie takes it to a whole other level of ridiculousness!

Intermission

We need to pause for a moment so I can do what I do best, namely punch giant holes in badly rendered stories. Where do I start? I know! The scene between the twins and the older white man. I realize Coogler is a Millennial, so he’s relying on a lot of imparted information and even his own extrapolating but there’s no fucking way that white man would have met two young-ish black men by himself. Also, no Grand Dragon would accept money as payment from blacks. Steal it? Sure. And for damn sure no white man would have allowed himself to be spoken to the way the twins do when they threaten him and his fellow Klansmen! The Smokestack twins wouldn’t have survived the hour, let alone making it all the way to the big opening. Mere minutes into the film, it already feels like a 1970s-era blacksploitation fantasy than the accurate depiction it’s being hailed as.

The Performances: Much is being made of the acting in this movie and, while it’s certainly competent and believable, it ain’t all that. Michael B. Jordan’s asshole face finally serves him well as he plays too dicks for the price of one. Delroy Lindo is a grandmaster. Newcomer Miles Caton as Sammie is about as good as a musician who’s never acted before is expected to be. He could have used a few more lessons but he mostly sells his character. Hailee Steinfeld is good as well, although her “blackcent” slips several times and often just sounds like a southern white woman to me. She seems a tad too contemporary in her deliveries but I’ve come to expect that from younger actors.
This brings me to Jack O’Connell. I’m not saying you have to be an idiot to think his performance good but it wouldn’t hurt. He is awful. Terrible. Shitty. Horrible. I laughed every time he was on screen, including during his smoky introduction. I haven’t seen an actor that bad in a vampire role since Richard Roxburgh’s Dracula in 2004’s Van Helsing!

The Music: If you’re a Blues fan, you will most likely love the music performed inside the juke joint. If you love Irish folkloric music, you will probably love the stuff being sung outside the juke joint. If you like both, you’re probably dangerously mentally ill and I’m afraid of you but you will definitely enjoy yourself. But that’s just surface-level stuff, isn’t it? For you see, in Coogler’s vision, music isn’t simply a way to eat up screentime for a thinly plotted movie. Nay, ‘tis also a powerful force for opening the rift between time periods and, I guess, attracting demonic forces, although this is barely hinted at and not very well explained. But that’s cool. What really matters is how people were so dazzled by the way a certain sequence was staged and executed that most of them never once questioned how insanely ridiculous the conceit is.
Whatever the hell Coogler thinks the Blues can accomplish on a supernatural level despite it being basic as fuck, our Irish vampire Remmick disagrees with my assessment as he brings his new white friends to the black juke joint to join in the merriment. When he is turned away (Again, turning away a white man in 1932) Remmick and his crew remind us why there was so much bigotry towards the Irish by torturing us with their shitty music.
As Remmick turns one colored victim after another into a vampire, he finally accumulates enough of them to execute one of the most where-the-fuck-did-that-come-from moments in movie history as they start dancing to the Irish ditty being performed. Get it? Even the white man who looks down on the Klan wants to turn black people into uncle Toms who “coon” around for white folks. So deep.

The Action: Blink and you’ll miss it. 75% of this movie is foreshadowing that forgets the “fore” part. It’s just one set-up after another, which isn’t a bad thing on its face. Plenty of films pull this off and, to be honest, had there been no vampires in this film, Coogler might have done so as well. Because despite my issues with him as a filmmaker and my even bigger ones with him as a writer, much of what comes before the vamps show up is pretty good, often flirting with great. This is in spite of the leaps of logic the screenplay takes with race relations. However, once the vampire stuff starts, it’s all running and dying and shooting. It’s nothing we haven’t seen a million times before and just like with his Black Panther films, Coogler is no action movie director.

The Fans: There’s a disturbing trend on social media where anyone who didn’t care for this movie is automatically labeled a Klan member or told the movie isn’t for them. You can guess who is writing this. The interesting thing is, in this era of white racists feeling more emboldened than they have seen the early 1960s, none of the people disliking the movie have written anything racially charged. Their criticisms are the kind one would expect to see regarding any movie somebody didn’t like. They have issues with the pacing, the script, the inclusion of vampires, the fact that they feel it’s derivative of other, better movies. It should be okay not to like things that happen to be about racial minorities or contain feminist themes based on the execution but instead these non-fans are immediately ganged up on and dismissed because the cult must protect its holy work. Same thing happened with Barbie, a far worse movie than this one as far as I’m concerned.

Race: Ugh. Here we go. I’m less comfortable with this part than any other but it needs to be written. It’s best done as a breakdown, I think.:
Whites- It’s best to view this movie as one seen through the eyes of black Americans in the 1930s when every white face was a potential death sentence. True to form, the only white character in the movie (there aren’t many, which is fine) is the vampire whose shifting attitudes symbolize the often accessible but never fully trustworthy armchair white liberals that still exist to this day.
Blacks- It’s common to portrays one’s own people as the only interesting, likable ones in a story and that definitely happens here. I suppose turnabout is fair play since it’s been going on in white-helmed movies for decades, at least until recently. There’s always been a tendency to lean too far into the “Noble Savage” mentality when it comes to blacks and Native Americans, as if even their flaws were hidden virtues and nothing about them was morally questionable in comparison to their white oppressors. That also happens here to some extent.
(Speaking of) Native Americans- Coogler does his best to represent the non-white groups that would have been in Mississippi in 1932 by including one of the arguably best scenes in the movie when a band of Choctaw Indians do their best to hunt down the fleeing Irish Vampire. Sadly, we only see them once despite them being the best thing in and about the damn movie!
Asians- Many Asian people I’ve spoken to have expressed their sadness at being treated like an after-thought in America and this film does very little to change that. Billed as the “model minority” by many whites over the years, Asians are usually viewed as either the Other or the prime example of cultural assimilation. There are only two in “Sinners,” a married couple with the combined personalities of driftwood on a calm sea. The inclusion feels pandering and kind of insulting because a black filmmaker ought to know better.
Mixed People Person: Okay, I’m going to take a few deep breaths before I dive back into this because of its personal nature. Here we go. There is an has always been a concerted effort in the black community to make it seem as if nobody ever had a problem with mixed (black & white) people. It was all white peoples’ fault, not theirs. When somebody chose to pass for white, black people didn’t expose them out of resentment or even jealousy, it was because it was the right thing to do.
BULL. SHIT.
Because I’d forgotten that Millennials are actually some of the most brainwashed people on Earth regardless of skin color or gender, I mistakenly assumed we might finally get an accurate depiction of what a young Biracial woman in the Jim Crow Era Deep South might be put through by not only whites but her supposed “own people” as well. Instead, Steinfeld’s character is treated like this beloved member of everybody’s family. My grandmother would’ve been roughly her age at that time and she was treated so badly by her black family that she went through life unable to stop talking about it at random times. Slapped to the ground in front of white men by her black uncle because they thought he was walking with a white woman. Money stolen from her because she forgot her place and got all uppity about wanting to go away to college. Forbidden to go out with her favorite cousin because who did she think she was. “You ain’t white!” I feel my blood pressure raising over the absolute hypocrisy in this portrayal so Imma stop now.

The Vampire Stuff: Finally, we reach the part that is oddly the most contentious portion of this supposedly meaningful treatise on race and spirituality: The goddam vampires. No pun intended, but they suck. Not only is Jack O’Connell a scenery chewing “actor” whose every utterance sounds like it’s his first day talking, but the entire way they are portrayed is rather uninspired. Their physical strength seems to vary depending on the needs of the plot and, for some reason, they prance around to Irish folk music because their progenitor likes it. The whole thing feels shoe-horned in, as if Coogler didn’t trust his concept enough to tell the story without adding creatures of the night when Klan members would have been sufficient.

Spoilers Ahead (Read at thine own peril and stuff):

The final scene after all the vampire-created carnage features Jordan’s surviving twin Stack ambushing the Klan members who show up the next morning presumably to kill any coloreds they can find and make the world safe for racist old white guys again. It’s satisfying to watch Stack snipe most of them and then kill the rest up close. I’ve heard people refer to it as a “Django Unchained” moment which is pretty insulting to that film, really. Django was fighting for his life in a failed attempt to escape from a slavery plantation. Stack could have just jumped in the car and left.

There’s no reason for this scene except audience satisfaction because Coogler isn’t confident enough in his less definitive false ending of mere moments earlier. Not only that, but we’re once again in blacksploitation territory because there’s no way in hell what Stack does will not result in the horrible burning deaths of dozens of innocent black people. Worst of all, he catches a bullet and dies right next to the Klan members, so no mystery there as to who killed these white men who are probably pillars of their racist-ass community. Is that the “sin” Stack commits? No, the sin is Coogler’s lazy screenwriting. How else does one explain every single vampire at the end being too stupid to get out of the sun?

The less said about the Buddy Guy scene, the better.

** out of ****