If you love brain-teasers, give this one a whirl: Try to think of something, anything, that vampires haven’t done yet. And before you raise your hand and say “I got one,” check your work, because even if you think there’s never been a musical about a 300-year-old vampire virgin whose true love gets reincarnated every 22 years, but who always — always — gets murdered by a pirate with a rhinestone peg leg who wields a hambone as a murder weapon… believe it or not, that’s been done.
It’s a challenge to find something new to say about a topic that’s been filmed to death/undeath, but Ryan Coogler is up to the task. After bursting onto the scene with the tragic and shocking biopic “Fruitvale Station” in 2013, Coogler spent the next 12 years filming iconic tales of Black heroism. His “Rocky” spinoff, “Creed,” is a classic in its own right, living up to and challenging the Oscar-winning original. Coogler’s two superhero movies, “Black Panther” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” brought Afro-futurism to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and inspired audiences the world over. They’re also two of the only MCU movies that have their own personality, as though they were directed by a filmmaker whose perspective couldn’t be clouded by corporate mandate.
With “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler turns his attention to tales of yore, and not just vampires. Set in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1932, the film stars singer Miles Caton as “Preacher Boy” Sammie Moore. He dreams of becoming a blues singer, but his father — a preacher, as you might have guessed — warns him to stay away from dens of iniquity. If he keeps dancing with the devil, Sammie’s father tells him, one day the devil will follow him home.
Then again, Sammie knows some devils already: His identical twin cousins Smoke and Stack are played by Michael B. Jordan (and also Michael B. Jordan) in some of the finest “Parent Trap” visual effects ever put to celluloid. Smoke and Stack ditched Mississippi years ago to find their fortunes, but after fighting in World War I and making a name for themselves in the Chicago organized crime scene, they’ve come home with a wad of cash, a mountain of liquor and a plan to open the greatest blues bar ever known.
Over the course of one extremely eventful day, Smoke and Stack enlist Sammie to work in their club, as well as blues luminary Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), Hoodoo practitioner Annie (Wunmi Mosaku, “Lovecraft Country”), the lovable Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller, “True Lies”) and various other locals. Yes sir, it seems like Smoke and Stack’s juke joint really is going to be the best there ever was. At least until the vampires show up.
Ryan Coogler films “Sinners” like an old-fashioned historical epic. Giant tales of giant people, filmed in awe-inspiring Imax, making a name for themselves as criminals, musicians and local legends. Their stories were fascinating without the vampires, and Coogler lets their lives play out for a good, long while before introducing the supernatural. “Sinners” has a lot in common with Robert Rodriguez’s “From Dusk till Dawn,” holding off on the bloodsuckers for so long that the audience is almost as shocked as the characters when they turn up, transforming a tale of fascinating figures and cinematic criminality into a last-minute demonic siege picture.
But Coogler, being Coogler, isn’t content to just show two Michaels B. Jordan squaring off against vampires. That would have been more than enough to justify the ticket price alone, but “Sinners” has much more on its mind. The creatures in this film, led by an oddly eerie Jack O’Connell (“Ferrari”), aren’t mindless beasts or bourgeois devils. They’re musicians, too, playing Irish folk songs and espousing peace and love. Coogler envisions vampirism as a proto-hippie cult, preaching a new world order where bigotry has vanished and all cultures merge into a single hive mind — and “Sinners” doesn’t vilify that idea outright.
Instead, “Sinners” evolves into a complex tale of cultural survival, as Black artists fight tooth and nail to preserve their spirits and resist homogenization. “Sinners” has all the vampire iconography we’ve come to expect — bloody stakings, sexy neck wounds, action and terror aplenty — and settles on this new, complicated twist. As Coogler weaves his powerful ode to blues culture, he ties both the horror and the music into sprawling historical traditions. It’s a lot to chew on, and he may have made more of a meal than we can possibly devour in one sitting, but there are so many great ideas and so much intriguing character work that we can take home the leftovers. And when we’re done pondering the details of “Sinners” in our own time, we can always come back for seconds… and thirds.
Ryan Coogler assembled a mighty cast for this southern gothic gangster vampire musical western coming-of-age story. Michael B. Jordan gives two incredible performances, aided by those impeccable visual effects, and Miles Caton shows off his haunting singing voice and creates a powerful young character in his feature film debut. Jack O’Connell makes for an unlikely, earnest villain. Delroy Lindo knows how to play the brilliant, seasoned artist who brings respectability to the whole project just by showing up. Hailee Steinfeld also co-stars as Mary, Stack’s ex-lover, and she confidently tackles some of the film’s bluntest material.
“Sinners” is a bloody, brilliant motion picture. Ryan Coogler finds within the vampire genre an ethereal thematic throughline; and within the music genre a disturbing, tempting monster. Stunningly photographed, engrossing cinema — epic to the point where it seemingly never ends, which is thematically appropriate, perhaps, but also undeniably indulgent. Even that is no great sin: this is a film about indulgence, the power indulgence wields and the dangers indulgence invites into our lives. It’s a sweaty, intoxicating, all-nighter of a movie, and its allure cannot be denied.
“Sinners” claws its way into theaters on April 18.
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