Time to again dust off the “swinging for the fences” cliche. Following the huge success of Black Panther and Creed, Ryan Coogler has gratefully accepted close to $100 million from Warner Bros and put every cent on the screen. That hoary baseball phrase is usually employed to describe an absurdly elaborate project that doesn’t quite come off. Sure enough, everything about Sinners suggests the sort of irresponsible slug that will be caught theatrically before clearing the bleachers.
It’s a period vampire flick that doesn’t turn supernatural until 45 minutes into its running time. It’s a blues-heavy musical that brings Funkadelic stand-ins and hip-hop DJs to a hoedown in Prohibition-era Mississippi. It has not just one but two Michael B Jordans.
None of this will, for Irish readers, sound nearly so risky as the scene during which – look away if you’re sensitive to even the suggestion of Micksploitation – Jack O’Connell joins other blood-starved Celtic vampires in a massed rendition of Rocky Road to Dublin while dancing variations on an Irish jig.
All this shot on lavish 65mm film with Imax and Ultra Panavision cameras.
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Sinners is potentially the stuff of great-folly listicles, but, against the odds, Coogler pulls it all off to deliver the best mainstream studio picture of the year so far. It would be stretching things to say there are no signs of disorder. Even the greatest general will lose some control when marching an entire division over hostile highlands. But, far from feeling indulgent, the picture is positively economical in the way it addresses so many ideas – sociological, cultural, historical – while forwarding its rattling, viscera-soaked yarn.
We eventually end up with a siege horror in the vein of Night of the Living Dead. So rich is the preamble that few will begrudge the longish wait to that final showdown. The Smokestack twins (Jordan plays Smoke and Stack in apparent tribute to Howlin’ Wolf’s Smokestack Lightning) arrive back from Chicago with a sack full of money and a plan to set up a speakeasy. A spot is purchased and they set out to gather musicians, catering services and security staff.
Their young cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) will play guitar. Delroy Lindo is irreplaceable as a harmonica player. Li Jun Li and Yao play a sassy Chinese-American couple who help out with food and signage. Improbable as it may seem, by (uh-oh!) sundown the joint is open and the band is blaring a blues number – shot to suggest Ernie Barnes’s renowned painting The Sugar Shack – that becomes a tribute to a whole century of African-American music.
Somewhere in there we have seen O’Connell’s undead Remmick make vampires of neighbouring white sharecroppers. Later, possessed and possessor arrive at the bar and, after failing to gain entry with a bluegrass audition, retire nearby to warble the Scottish ballad Wild Mountain Thyme. That deranged take on Rocky Road follows.
There is a suggestion here that the Irish and Scots are being pitched as enemies to the black community, but Coogler’s script has thornier, more interesting arguments to make. The vampires, now swollen with black converts, ultimately present themselves as a diverse underclass in opposition to the ruling Klan mobocracy. Was this the only way common ground could then be found?
None of this gets in the way of a ludicrously violent denouement that has each successive massacre striving to outdo what has come immediately before. Mortal terror is balanced with the sharpest of black humour. If you never tire of the “It’s not what it looks like” punchline, then Sinners has a doozy for you.
First-class movie entertainment of the most opulent school. Please help make it a proper smash.
In cinemas from Friday, April 18th
