The most famous legend in all of musical lore is that of guitarist Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil in exchange for blues greatness. With Sinners, writer/director Ryan Coogler takes inspiration from Johnson's story and remixes it as a vampire thriller and a tribute to popular music's roots in the Delta blues. An alternate title might be "The House That Honeydripped Blood."
Coogler's regular leading man Michael B. Jordan delivers a dual performance as "the SmokeStack twins," Smoke and Stack, a pair of identical twin brothers who have returned to their hometown in the rural Mississippi of 1932 after a stint in Chicago where they played the Italian and Irish mobs off one another (one imagines a Yojimbo/Fistful of Dollars-inspired prequel). Loaded with Italian wine and Irish beer (as an Irishman I can assure you we're not a people known for our beer production), Smoke and Stack purchase a barn from a local Klansman and set about turning it into a juke joint that very night.
Much of the first act follows the classic "getting the band together" format as Smoke and Stack recruit entertainers in alcoholic bluesman Delta Slim (a scene-stealing Delroy Lindo), preacher's son and guitar prodigy Sammie (Miles Caton), and young songstress Pearline (Kayme Lawson), along with voodoo occultist and cook Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), Chinese-American couple Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bo (Yao) to man the bar, and the burly Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) to keep unwanted intruders out.
And unwanted intruders certainly do arrive. Remmick (Jack O'Connell), a banjo-picking vampire who at one point seems to have emigrated from Ireland, appears to fall out of the sky, attracted by the music of the juke joint. Turning a pair of folk-singing Klan members (singers Lola Kirke and Peter Dreimanis) into vampires, Remmick heads for the juke joint, hoping to convert a few more souls, and a classic siege ensues.
Combining the highlighting of a specific regional flavour of African-American music with genre thrills, Sinners is a more successful version of what Robert Altman was trying to achieve with Kansas City. Coogler leans into the music and the horror so heavily that some viewers may find the contrast too jarring (at my screening each new musical number prompted a few fresh walkouts). As a big fan of both American roots music and horror movies, Sinners is right up my alley, but while I was enthralled by the film's musical aspect, the horror side left me cold. Sinners plays like a very good Walter Hill movie (I'm thinking the musical fantasia of Streets of Fire and Hill's own take on the Robert Johnson legend, Crossroads) that then morphs into a mediocre John Carpenter siege thriller, more Ghosts of Mars than Assault on Precinct 13. Coogler calls back to Carpenter's remake remake of The Thing in a couple of places, but he lacks Carpenter's ability to create spine-tingling suspense. A sequence that replaces The Thing's unforgettable blood test set-piece with various parties eating garlic to prove they're not vampires has none of the tension of its more skilfully crafted predecessor. Coogler's script struggles to communicate some of its supernatural ideas, resorting to characters telling us the sort of vampire lore everyone is familiar with, like a Batman movie insisting on showing us how Bruce Wayne's parents were killed for the umpteenth time. A subplot involving the KKK arrives as an afterthought that makes us wonder if the movie might have worked better if the Klan had been the main villains rather than the vampires.
While the vampire shtick here is largely old hat, it's certainly interesting how Coogler uses his vampires to prompt some political and philosophical musing. Like Black Panther's Killdozer, Remmick is an antagonist who arguably might be more noble-minded than the nominal heroes. The film posits Remmick as a socialist leader who wants to build a multiracial army free of inequality. Sinners suggests that vampires don't care about skin colour because we all bleed red. But as is often the case with such figures, Remmick's grand claims of a communal utopia are a myth. He may welcome people of colour into his undead flock, but ultimately they're all forced to dance to his tune (quite literally, in a toe-tapping sequence of vampiric Riverdance). One wonders if Coogler is aiming a sly dig at Hollywood's transparent obsession with diversity, where women and filmmakers of colour are forced to settle for the reheated leftovers of a century of white male industry dominance rather than being allowed to tell their own stories (with the excellent Creed, Coogler is one of the few filmmakers to actually make something of such constraints). Or could it be Coogler's reckoning with becoming part of the soulless Marvel machine?
Coogler may not prove himself a master of horror here, but there's some striking filmmaking on display. Coogler introduces Smoke and Stack with a simple scene of the twins passing a cigarette back and forth. This small gesture simultaneously lets us know that there's no point trying to find the digital seams of a remarkable piece of effects wizardry while also establishing the tight relationship of two men who have been through everything together. It's in the musical sequences that Coogler gets to let loose, turning a blues stomper into a dazzling tribute to the past and present of African-American music as P-Funk guitarists, b-boys, fly girls and West African tribesmen all magically materialise on the dancefloor (one wonders what Coogler might have done with Michael Jackson and Prince in their heydays).
Though set in 1932, it's the spirit of '70s American cinema that most inhabits Sinners. It's sexy, sweaty, foul-mouthed and dirty-minded in a way mainstream American movies haven't been since that unfettered era. In Smoke and Stack we have the sort of morally ambiguous anti-heroes that made '70s movies so appealing and challenging, and Jordan is clearly relishing the chance to play such nuanced characters. There's much to admire here, and it's a pleasure to see a talented filmmaker given free rein away from the stifling constraints of franchise filmmaking. It's just a shame that all these ideas and grand spectacle ultimately end up in service of a derivative vampire thriller.
Directed by: Ryan Coogler
Starring: Michael B. Jordan, Delroy Lindo, Jack O'Connell, Jayme Lawson, Wunmi Mosaku, Omar Benson Miller, Hailee Steinfeld, Li Jun Li, Lola Kirk
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