Ryan Coogler’s Sinners delivers a pair of Michael B Jordans, a whole lot of music, and is the best studio genre movie of the year to date. Our review:
As a regular listener to the Kermode & Mayo film podcast, I’m well aware of its ‘six laugh test’ criteria. That is, a film comedy needs to generate half a dozen chuckles at the least to earn its keep.
I have a slight variant on it: the six characters test. I’m increasingly finding with big Hollywood films that I struggle to remember the names of more than two characters by the time I get to the end credits. It might be my failing faculties, but I also think a lot of blockbusters struggle to generate characters who you can remember the day after. James Cameron’s Aliens? I can reel off a bunch of names. James Cameron’s Avatar? Well, it’s the blue fella and his chums, innit.
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is the first sizeable studio film I’ve watched in some time that absolutely sails through the six character test. I can tell you their names, I can tell you what they did, and I can tell you why they did it. It’s a real rarity, accepting that it shouldn’t be. And while it’s cheating that Michael B Jordan plays two of them, for those of us who sat through the pretty decent The Alto Knights, we’re not in novelty De Niro territory here. It actually makes sense.
The film itself is – get this – a standalone, $100m genre movie, that comes with blood, blues music, no existing intellectual property and a 15 certificate. Coogler’s a rare filmmaker who’s made an impression in the often-suffocating confines of franchise cinema. Creed and Black Panther are both excellent and distinct, and here, Sinners is a project he’s generated himself, that Warner Bros won a bidding war for.
The setup, then. In October 1932, at a church in Clarksdale, the preacher’s son – Sammie – interrupts the service. He’s got scratches on the back of his head, his once glistening guitar is smashed into pieces, and I’ve already jolted out of my seat once by this point.
Shifting the action back to the day before, Coogler then busies himself slowly setting his stage, and it’s a masterclass in getting the setup right to build up to a pay-off.
You thus have twin brothers, Smoke and Stack (played by Michael B Jordan and Michael B Jordan), who purchase what looks like a disused timber mill off a seemingly not very pleasant man. They’ve been plying their trade in prohibition-era Chicago, and are spending their funds after returning to Clarksdale to set up a bar, and leaving past demons behind them.
Chums, it doesn’t go well, but they do bring along some interesting folks to help them out. Newcomer Miles Caton is Sammie for a start, and then there’s Tenaj L Jackson’s Beatrice, Andre Ward-Hammond’s Ruthie, Li Jun Li’s Grace, Jayme Lawson’s Pearline and Hailee Steinfeld’s Mary. That’s before we get to Delroy Lindo and his splendid teeth, too.
Much of the early part of the film is outdoors, a clearly-extensive exterior set build that Coogler and cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw fluidly roam. Budget has been spent on old-fashioned ingredients, such as human beings, and the rewards are rich.
The beautiful landscapes are matched by gorgeous skylines, and it allows Coogler to build up a warm tone, but with an ongoing feeling that something’s not quite right. Given I hadn’t watched the trailer or seen any promotion, I had no idea how it was going to go awry, but holy shit. Matters take hold, let’s go with that.
Not wanting to reveal more than I knew going in, I’d simply suggest that this is a proper three act film, done properly, by someone who also happily embraces genre. I found myself writing down movie names such as The Thing, Once Upon A Time In The West, Interstellar, The Wicker Man and O Brother Where Are Thou? as I jotted down notes once the film had finished. Just for tiny touchpoints, and impressively married up to something in its own way also quite singular.
I’m saving a paragraph or two for music.
From the opening moments to the mid- and post-credits sequence, music is pivotal to the film and wonderfully married to the on-screen events. I hear filmmakers in interviews regularly talk about music being vital to their movies, but few have demonstrated it so keenly as Coogler does here. Lyrics are tied tightly to what we see, and the blues soundtrack album deserves to be a chart-topper. Coogler’s used music smartly before – his timing of the Bill Conti fanfare in Creed is perfect – but this is different level stuff. There’s a moment in the film where Jack O’Connell starts singing, and it’s a superb tonal shift.
Sinners is a film that crosses the two hour mark, and only towards its final stretch does it start to lose its energy a tiny bit (perhaps a side effect of having so many active characters, and trying to serve them well). But it’s a while since I’ve seen a genre film this confident, and one this good. It saves a treat or two for the credits that are actually worth waiting for as well, and it sets a high bar for studio movies for the rest of the year.
Here’s to more films that pass the six character test. Filmmakers, Ryan Coogler’s shown you just how to do it…
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