Mildly obscene fakelore turns the blues into horror-movie trash.
The black blues/vampire hybrid Sinners mimics a mixed-genre Tarantino bash. Its story of Chicago gangsters, twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan), who return to their Mississippi hometown in 1932, closely follows the plot of the Nineties vampire extravaganza From Dusk till Dawn, which was directed by Robert Rodriquez in QT fanboy mode.
Here, writer-director Ryan Coogler goes for the same trite Afrocentricity as when he made Marvel’s Black Panther and its inexcusable sequel Wakanda Forever, but the mash-up of Southern black-blues mythology with horror-film gimmicks exposes his immature cultural appreciation.
Jordan’s dual roles emulate the Rodriquez siblings who were played by George Clooney and Tarantino himself, but with no sense of parody. Instead, Jordan’s CGI Winklevoss stunt is distinguishable only by having one mean brother in a blue cap and a meaner brother in a red fedora.
When Smoke and Stack fight off devious redneck vampires who are members of the Ku Klux Klan, Sinners is no different than the trivialization of slavery in QT’s Django Unchained. This social justice kitsch becomes a mildly obscene evocation of racial terrorism. (One of two epilogues feature a roided-up Jordan reliving Stack’s WWI trauma in his own KKK massacre — an Inglourious Basterds rip-off.) Coogler attempts to out-scare Jordan Peele’s Get Out, using horror tropes to match the anguish expressed by the blues.
But Coogler shows no real understanding of Southern blues culture beyond Smoke and Stack’s facile cynicism: “Blues wasn’t forced on us like religion,” Smoke says. “It’s the magic that we do.” The film’s opening narration about “music so true, it can penetrate the veil between life and death” panders to Millennial segregation. That old “crossroads” mythology about Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil is replaced by references to West African griots and hostile white devils. It’s critical race theory stuff, a Black Studies curriculum by way of Hollywood. (More on that below.)
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Why is this hackneyed, race-based action movie (Coogler calls it “genre fluid”) titled Sinners? Churchgoing is at such a low point that even black politicians who recently sang “We Shall Overcome” in petulant protest in Congress have lost sight of what religion once meant to the civil rights movement. Since contemporary audiences no longer relate to the concept of “sinners,” Coogler’s sense of black American religiosity is limited to jinxes. Stack’s former lover Annie (imposing, womanly Wunmi Mosaku) briefly mentions a mojo bag and haints. This fakelore is as unconvincing as the 1930s Jim Crow Mississippi locale — a pretend South like in The Color Purple musical remake and The Piano Lesson.
Stack debunks Annie’s sexual aggression (“Your body can’t forget me”), but the film’s best scene lacks the emotional pull of the sensual-spiritual mix in Jonathan Demme’s Beloved, coarsening black emotional relations. Stack rejects Annie’s hoodoo, saying, “No ghost, just power. Only money give you that.” This is hip-hop juvenilia for the millennium, minimizing black culture as, essentially, spiritually rootless.
Coogler exploits the blues without accounting for its compelling folkloric qualities that contributed to the exceptionalism of American popular culture. The vampire attack lacks Robert Rodriquez’s flair (Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s cinematography is grim and underlit), ruining the juke-joint celebration that crosses the time barrier, combining L.L. Cool J hip-hop, Chinese opera, Alvin Ailey ballet, Mariachi bands, and Bollywood dancing in a Dionysian revelry that rehashes the Matrix Reloaded multiculti orgy.
This reverse-racist showpiece is a counterpoint to the KKK vampires waiting outside the juke joint — indulging in red-eyed drooling and jig-dancing to the Irish-Scottish folk tune “Wild Mountain Thyme.” At first it suggests the coven scene in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown,” but more likely, it’s a simple-minded rebuke of the Coen brothers’ folk music thesis in O Brother Where Art Thou? Coogler displays a 1619 Project purpose: His juxtaposition of vampire/tribal debauches revives the irresolvable racism that lay at the heart of Americana.
When Klansman-ghoul Remmick (Jack O’Connell) threatens Smoke, Stack, and their libidinous revelers with “I want your stories and your songs,” his soul-stealing usurpation becomes Coogler’s obvious allegory of showbiz victimization. It’s no surprise in this era of white apologetics that Warner Bros. would finance a movie that promotes its own corporate villainy — or that Coogler would embarrass his own race consciousness.
Coogler’s one-dimensional rehash of black American history degrades the legacy of the Southern blues, a subject that playwright August Wilson explored in his best dramas — Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Seven Guitars, and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. The latter featured Delroy Lindo in an astonishing Broadway performance as a man battling the internalized power and anguish of the blues and the church. But Lindo’s role as Delta Slim in Sinners degrades August Wilson’s concept so laughably that it proves Coogler’s generation has lost connection to black history, art, and spirituality, traducing all that into Hollywood trash. Like the trite Black Panther, Sinners is just ethnic heresy.