Rating: C+
Dir: Ryan Coogler
Star: Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Jack O’Connell
I enjoyed this more the first time I saw it, when it was called From Dusk Till Dawn. Ok, that is a little snarky. But this appears to be the 2025 version of Everything Everywhere All at Once – a reasonably decent film, whose elevation to acclaim and cultural significance leaves me bemused. Sinners certainly had its moments. I mean, it is a hundred and thirty-seven minutes long, so I hope it would. But unlike Dusk, this feels like two different films glued together. One is black life in rural America in the thirties, and the other is a vampire siege movie. To my surprise, it was the former which I thought worked better.
Twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Jordan) return to their Mississippi home, after time spent working in shady Chicago business. They plan to open a juke joint, and hire Sammie, a young blues guitarist (Caton) to provide music for opening night. Sammie is good. Very good. Good enough to summon ghosts from both the past and future. Unfortunately, it also summons Irish vampire Remmick (O’Connell) and his increasing band of bloodsuckers. It feels ironic for a black film whose themes supposedly include cultural appropriation, to wholly appropriate the whitest of monsters, the middle European vampire, as its big bad. Old-school Haitian zombies might have been a better fit, culturally. But they wouldn’t have been able to Riverdance, as Remmick does. Slightly better than sparkling, I guess?
Mind you, go ahead and appropriate culture, I say. Take whatever you want from mine. If you can do anything with bagpipes, be my guest. [I note one of the “Irish” folk songs sung here is very much Scottish in origin…] At least this is fairly restrained on the social commentary. I was concerned, reading glowing reviews with sentences saying the vampires were “chilling manifestations of capitalism’s insatiable hunger and white supremacy’s endless capacity for cultural theft.” Fortunately, it’s nowhere near as bad as that makes it sound. There is a subplot about the KKK, which the film itself forgets about until after its own climax. That’s a tendency elsewhere. Despite – or perhaps because of? – the length, some threads don’t amount to much. Sammie’s mystical talents, for example, exist solely for an (admittedly cool) era-bending musical number, then get forgotten.
I was more impressed with the humans than the vampires, who are annoyingly inconsistent. At one point, Smoke goes full John Woo on a vamp, unloading two entire clips into one, with little effect. Yet in the finale, the monsters go down with ease – even Remmick, who also appears to forget about the sunlight thing. I’d have preferred this if it had abandoned the whole vampire concept, and had made the KKK the enemy instead. As is, any attempts at social commentary are weakened by the fantastic elements, for the same reason I can’t take the original Dawn of the Dead seriously as a critique of consumerism. Like Romero, I suspect Coogler was too in love with his metaphor – here, vampires as white society, sucking the cultural life from black Americans. And it kinda shows.