Sinners
Apple Cinemas Extreme
Hartford
April 18, 2025
I’m going to start applying my “no expectations” rule to movies from now on.
It’s hard not to build up hopes when you’re familiar with the body of work of the filmmakers, though. As soon as I heard that Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan had teamed up again for the new movie Sinners, I started counting down the days until its April 18 premiere. And I was right there in Apple Cinemas Extreme on opening night.
Sinners tells the story of twin brothers Smoke and Stack, both played by Michael B. Jordan, returning to their southern home from Chicago to open a juke joint. They buy the property from Hogwood (David Maldonado), who is also the leader of the local Ku Klux Klan, despite his protestations to the contrary.
After securing the venue, the twins set out to put together their all-star team of talent: Delta Slim on the harmonica (played with living, breathing realism by Delroy Lindo), singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson who does well), and banjo player/singer Sammie Moore (Miles Caton, who delivers a solid performance in his first starring role).
They’re joined by Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), Stack’s ex-girlfriend who passes for white, Smoke’s ex-wife Beatrice (who oozes sex appeal throughout the movie), and Chinese shopkeepers Bo and Grace Chow.
Everything is going swimmingly until the vampires show up. Then all hell breaks loose.
Sinners tries to accomplish a lot. Its setting in the 1930s Mississippi Delta is shorthand for the oppressive racism that the nearly all-Black set of characters must deal with. Layered on top of that is the battle between occult belief and Christian values in the Black community; layered on top of that is all the interpersonal strife and history between the main characters.
The main issue is that the various threads of Sinners never form a cohesive whole. It feels like there are three different movies happening at the same time.
Sammie’s music is positioned as the key to the supernatural world, and his pastor father warned him as much. However, the music is more of a novelty than a true center of the magic. There’s a remarkable scene where the ghosts of the past, present and future dance to Sammie’s music, and it’s great fun to see b‑boys breakdancing while the blues is playing.
Yet the catalyst of the plot, two Klan members being turned into vampires by Irish immigrant/vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell), occurs miles away from the juke joint. While the film says that the music is what attracted them to the juke joint, it feels more like pretense. Vampires go around looking to bite people. That’s just what they do.
The final thread of the narrative occurs in the last ten minutes, when Smoke unleashes his wrath on Hogwood and the Klan members who have come to kill him and reclaim the juke joint. This part of the movie plays like pure racial revenge. I have no problem with that at all. It just felt out of place at the end of a vampire movie.
Any of these threads — ghosts reanimated by music, Jim Crow-era vampires, and revenge against the good old boys — could have been their own movie. But crammed together in just over two hours, it feels like none of the elements get their due.
Perhaps the biggest missed opportunity is the showdown between the survivors and the vampires. The movie grinds to a halt somewhere around the 1:20 mark, as the growing gang of vampires surrounds the juke joint, but are unable to enter it. The resulting standoff deflates the action, which had taken about an hour to ramp up to. When the fighting does start, it’s fast and brutal, but left me wishing that at least one more battle between humans and monsters had happened during the film.
Sinners isn’t a bad movie. It’s hard to put this much talent together and end up with something bad. But the Ryan Coogler/Michael B. Jordan duo has resulted in some genuinely great films, namely Creed and the first Black Panther. This movie comes nowhere close to those, and unfortunately, they’re the yardstick by which their partnership will be forever measured. Sinners commits the worst sin- not good enough to praise, not bad enough to pan. It’s an okay movie from two people we’ve learned to expect more from.
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Miles Caton delivering a solid performance in his first starring role, as Sammie Moore.