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In 1 9 3 2, African-American twins Smoke and Stack leave Chicago, abandoning their gangster lives to settle back in a town in Mississippi, where they buy a defunct sawmill to convert it into a night and dance club, and start an honest business. That evening, the night club has its premiere and attracts a lot of customers, while musicians Delta Slim, Pearline and Sammie perform. However, Irish vampire Remmick and his two possessed people show up, but are not invited inside. They still posses Mary, Stack's ex-girlfriend, and she enters inside, bites Stack and turns him into a vampire. The party guests leave. Smoke and his remaining friends battle the vampires and are able to eliminate Remmick. When the Ku Klux Klan appears in the morning, Smoke shoots them, but is fatally shot himself. Stack is spared and leaves to live with Mary in peace, while Sammie pursues a music career in Chicago.
"From Dusk Till Dawn" meets "Mississippi Burning"—"Sinners" is a good, but considering all the nominations and awards, overrated film that once again proves that there is not that much more to add to the overused vampire genre. It's neither inspired as a historical drama nor as a horror, but it is at least more fun in that horror half when it drops all the pretentious aspirations and simply plays out like a suspenseful siege thriller. Considering that the vampire is white, and he possesses a white Ku Klux Klan couple to help him attack the night club run by African Americans, this could be interpreted as a symbolical depiction of how racism destroyed a black sanctuary in the Southern United States of the first half of the 20th century, wrecking their idyllic plans to be free of repression. However, themes alone don't make a movie. In the first half, "Sinners" is a historical drama, showing twins Smoke and Stack (very well played by actor Michael B. Jordan in a double role) trying to start an honest life in the town and open up their own business, a night and music club. The dialogue is standard there, but the standout character is musician Delta Slim, played brilliantly by Delroy Lindo, who has some of the best lines—for instance, upon seeing the young and inexperienced Sammie who aspires to be a musician, the experienced Delta Slim comments that he had "socks older than him", whereas when asked what he did with all his earnings, Delta Slim honestly admits: "I drank all my money!" A lot of characters are introduced in this half, but many of them are not that well developed to the end, as they are interrupted by the horror half of the film which doesn't care for character development anymore, just for fighting and kicking vampires. Writer and director Ryan Coogler surprises by constantly changing genres, refreshingly refusing to follow the genre rules, and thus blends in drama, gangster, musical and horror elements, but at the end of the day, "Sinners" is not as fun nor as creative as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer".
Grade:++
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