Sinners (2025) Review
SnarkAI Score: 73/100
“Gorgeous cinematography, exceptional score, and the same basic plot as From Dusk Till Dawn — but set in a 1930s Juke Joint with twins, Irish vampires doing choreographed dances, and significantly less foot-fetish fan service.”
TL;DR: tldr: Ryan Coogler's American Gothic is 10/10 on cinematography and score, and asks you to overlook significant logic holes in everything else. Two Michael B. Jordans sounds better than it plays — this is not a comedy — and the film takes far too long to get to the vampires it's been promising you. Once it does, Miss Annie is a standout, the atmosphere is genuinely excellent, and the Irish vampire leading choreographed dancing outside is a choice we all must sit with. The vampire ecology is not sustainable — one to fifty in a single evening — but apparently vampires just can't afford watches. The ending, where MWJ finds immortality less freeing than being a Black criminal in the 1930s Deep South, is a great sentiment that falls apart under examination. The cinematography, though. The cinematography.
Ryan Coogler is great and I'm a fan, even if he does have the name of an 80s frat-boy film star rather than a serious director.
Beautifully shot and scored. 10/10 on both.
We must ask why two Michael B. Jordans? Seems needless — great actor as he is, it gives the film Mike Myers or Eddie Murphy vibes, and this is not a comedy. It's American Gothic. The dual Jordans are the Smokestack Twins, returning to their previous community after time away.
The film starts with a lot of great scene-setting in the South: racism, heat, false politeness and cotton fields. MBJ has been working for Al Capone and is back to his old stomping grounds, and he's stomping hard. MBJ 1 and 2 buy a warehouse — or sawmill, or something — and threaten the current owner, telling him that if he or any of his Klan buddies cross the property line he'll kill them. Rather than going to the sheriff, reporting the threat and having the two of them arrested while keeping their money, the Klan leader just laughs good-humouredly. It's unclear why a Klan leader would even sell to two Black brothers to allow them to start a jazz bar on what was his land. A lot of this film is a bit like that — it struggles if you think about it too much.
MBJ makes a big speech about power and how only money can get you that. Unlike the audience, he's not genre-savvy, and we're sat here waiting for the vampires. (To be fair, as immortals, vampires should be very rich due to the power of compound interest.)
He smokes a pipe, which is era-appropriate but weird to see — pipes are almost exclusively the domain of sea captains who now run fishing trawlers, or old British men in parlours talking to other aristocrats, in films now.
MBJ's a bit of a player; he's been sleeping with Hailee Steinfeld's character and the older voodoo/herb woman.
Some farmers take in a man running from Native Americans. The Native Americans arrive and warn them, in a really needlessly roundabout and non-serious way, that the man is dangerous, then leave with the setting sun. They could have been much clearer — even without mentioning vampires, simply 'this man has killed several people, he will kill you' would have done. But what's a horror film without terrible decision-making? The vampire kills the husband and brings him back as a spawn. End of Black historical crime segment; on to American Gothic vampire film.
If the concept seems familiar, it should — other than the setting, this is more or less an AU From Dusk Till Dawn, but with twins rather than brothers and significantly less foot-fetish fan service. We later find out the lead vampire is supposed to be very Irish, an immigrant to America. It's not convincing at all — he's very much an American with Irish ancestry. That's more a flaw of American cinema as a whole; they rarely make the effort with appropriate casting and accents for Europeans.
Hailee has a rich white husband MBJ set her up with, but she doesn't want to be white — she wants to be back in her community and with MBJ. This film may not have Tarantino's foot-fetish focus, but it's not avoiding pandering to MBJ's ego by having pretty much every woman in the film want him.
The three vampires try to talk their way into the Black bar as musicians 'who believe in equality.' They play some music — weirdly good and in sync given two of them were only just turned. They get turned away for being white, and call out Hailee for looking white.
The MBJ twins are a bit too loud and open about the idea of killing multiple white people, for the deep racist South. It's not safe to make jokes like that for Black people in the South now, let alone 1930s America.
The delay between first seeing the vampires and them actually showing up in a meaningful way is too long. We're more than halfway in, the surprise has happened, but it's not yet impacting the characters in the story. It's clunky storytelling — we're still focused on MBJ's burgeoning criminal empire.
Hailee decides to go chase down the vampires alone and have a chat to find out what they're up to. Which is an insane decision even without vampires — for a young, attractive Black woman to walk the streets of the deep South alone, armed though she is, somehow invisible in her skintight silk dress. No victim-blaming here, but as decisions go, I've seen better. The three vampires are incredibly creepy and suspicious-sounding; I really can't understand why anyone would approach them. They're deep in the uncanny valley.
Hailee gets eaten. She had to be invited back into the party. She seduces MBJ 1 whilst the other acts as bouncer via some loaded dice.
MBJ 1 gets eaten by vampire Hailee. MBJ 2 wastes no time shooting her with two guns. It does not slow her down as she runs into the night laughing. Finally we're into the meat of the film. Going forward he will be referred to as MWJ (Michael Was Jordan).
Miss Annie is genre-savvy. She's immediately aware Cornbread is a 'Haint,' and she's respected enough that the others defer to her. He's got the same creepy polite vibe as the musician vampires. MBJ is fairly stupid and, despite them all catching on to Miss Annie's message, still reaches past the protection of the door to hand Cornbread some money.
Slim is super dead. He gives us a whole speech about how he's survived everything up to now, how if death wants to come for MBJ 1 it will have to go through its old friend Delta Slim first. The only thing missing is telling us he's a week away from retirement.
When the people inside the bar go out to throw some corpses outside, they see that basically everyone who had been at the bar is now a vampire — other than five or six of them still inside. Despite sounding deeply Southern when we first met them, the lead singer and first vampire is now doing an 'oirish' accent, and they're all performing a choreographed Irish dance outside. There is at least some subtext of Christianity versus the traditions of Black America carried over from Africa. It's clumsy, honestly, given that Ireland has had as much of its ancestral religion crushed by Christianity as the African slaves of America.
Conceptually, they've killed and turned perhaps fifty people in an evening from a starting point of one vampire. How are they not a global plague? This is not a sustainable ecosystem.
The first vampire seems to be a full Sire — he's not only able to control the others in elaborate dance routines, but can now speak Toishanese. Grace folds when her daughter is threatened and basically dooms everyone by inviting the vampire army into the Juke Joint. They manage to kill some — far more than they should — with stakes and fire, and Miss Annie is lethal until she becomes a meal. Dramatic, but clunky.
With some Chekhov's silver, Sammie smashing the guitar over the plastic Paddy's head stuns him — there's silver in the strings. He's pretty monstrous by this point before MBJ 1 kills him. The thralls suffer and then catch fire in the sunlight and die. The reason vampires are not a global plague is apparently that they can't afford watches. It ends suddenly and far too easily for everyone. MBJ 1 and Sammie hug. It's unintentionally hilarious when he drives off in his bouncing jalopy.
MBJ 1 assassinates a dozen white men who turn up the following day — KKK members — but he shoots first and often. He grenades a truck as it leaves. He's shot once in this exchange, despite walking forward with no cover whatsoever. He dies from the bullet wound, which is probably fine, as he'd be getting the chair for slaughtering a dozen men, nasty as those men might be.
Many years later, we see Sammie running a club and playing guitar, when MWJ (dressed like DJ Jazzy Jeff) and Hailee (dressed like 80s Madonna) turn up looking just as young as before. MWJ sniffs Sammie in a weird and off-putting way. It's not addressed. Apparently MWJ was 'freer' on his final day as a criminal Black man in the Deep South in 1930s America than at any point since becoming an immortal vampire travelling the world with his vampire bride. It's the ending the film deserves — a good sentiment that falls apart under examination.