Sinners Review

Sinners, from mega successful auteur Ryan Coogler, is one of those movies that's so bad that it should define bad movies for years to come, like Southland Tales or Gigli or Showgirls, but won't for obvious reasons. So cringey—in one scene a dancing dragon Asian ninja appears in a juke joint in the 1920s Mississippi Delta, effectively destroying any possibility of seriousness—that it's almost good, because it's just such a complete and total mess on every level, made with absolute lack of care for the final product. It's a million solutions taped on top of a few really interesting ideas and good performances that have been retrofitted on top of each other via political correctness and sheer laziness in a garbage-like heap of complete nonsense.

It is profoundly, deeply racist, one of the most racist films I've ever seen—people will try to talk you out of this by saying "the vampires steal everybody's culture, that's the point!" but in broad strokes it's quite obviously "white people are evil culture vampires" and ends with an utterly non-sequitur Klan shoot 'em up that has nothing to do with the rest of the film.

But if it had simply had the balls to stick with what it obviously wants to be, it could've perhaps been coherent as an entrant in the bourgeoning white people bad genre. Instead, someone obviously came along and said "hey Mr Coogler, Trump won, we can't make this just a white people bad movie," so he throws the baby out with the bathwater and makes something with no consistent tone, zero logical storyline, no character development, and the most random disconnected series of images perhaps I’ve ever seen on screen. It's like someone spent $200 million turning a Ford Festiva into a Low Rider.

It shifts between a consciously postmodern fable, vaguely about the power of music and cultural parasitism, to a serious slavery/klan movie, then music biopic, then Dusk Til Dawn style horror vampire film. The writing is so amateur hour—for example you can tell an initial version of the script was written about some ghost entity called Haints, but then sloppily switched over to Vampires for some odd reason, prob because some cultural sensitivity person said "this isn't what Haints are." It also wants to be about Robert Johnson and the Delta Blues being stolen by white people (vampires), but then gets self conscious and inserts random Asian people with ridiculous Mississippi accents and aformentioned accompanying dragon dancing to into the “poor virgin non-white culture being vampirized by whites” scenes (Hey Ryan, if you’re so worried about cultural theft, how about you stop making $200 million Hollywood films!). The Robert Johnson character doesn't sell his soul to the Devil, instead he sort of merely escapes some vampires, making his entire character quite literally pointless. Nothing happens to the guy, which seems to fundamentally misunderstand the Blues itself on basically every level.

Black music is characterized it as part of a non-white metaculture moving through history summoning Haints (which are set up in the animated intro as the main monster, but then never appear!) and attracting vampires (which do appear and dance Irish jigs). It's just like why not make a Robert Johnson movie? Why can't we just do that well?

There are not one but two post-credits scenes, one an attempt at Tarantino-esque postmodernism (the whole thing feels like a botched nod to Tarantino) involving actual blues legend Buddy Guy refusing eternal life from vampires from earlier on. Here you get a sense that the original script was basically a Tarantino revisionist history thing meets horror, not the worst idea, and maybe had a coherent plot and semi well thought out payoff, but was somehow mangled beyond all recognition and left to rot in the sun.

Why are people going to see this movie? Who knows. Prob cause it's a big budget vampire flick which always works. Also Michael B Jordan is a genuine star, and fantastic actor with real on screen gravity, although he's not given anything real to work with besides some solid initial scenes.

The saddest thing about the woke era will not be that Coogler gets to make big movies, but that he gets to make SHITTY big movies because there's no one around to say "This absolutely sucks bro, let's pare this back, let’s focus on what’s good here and get rid of the rest." And thus instead of Jordan or Coogler getting pushed into greatness they deliver these camels made by committee that are an insult to filmmaking as a medium.