Sinners and its audience say fuck you to fascism

by Sean T. Collins

The number one movie in America two weeks running, which enjoyed a smaller second-weekend box-office drop than any film in modern history, ends with Michael B. Jordan machine-gunning Klansmen. This is not a coincidence. 

Sinners, the new movie from Black Panther/Creed/Fruitvale Station director Ryan Coogler, is a gorgeous and raucous vampire period piece about undead bloodsuckers descending on the grand opening of a Black-owned juke joint in 1930s Mississippi. Shot on large format film, it’s the most beautiful mashup of The Lost Boys, Road House, From Dusk till Dawn, and the cover of Marvin Gaye’s I Want You you’re ever going to see. The vampires are instantly memorable with minimal makeup: some fangs, some reflective metallic eyes, and voilà, a monster design for the ages. When the bloodletting finally gets going, it’s spectacular. I’m talking Sam Raimi levels. 

Beyond that, it’s gorgeous to look at. Twilight is a sumptuous purple, night a blackness lit by stars and fireflies, the juke joint the warm and inviting brown of wood and beer bottles. There’s a surprising and welcome amount of material about eating pussy, and the sex scenes are hot and refreshingly frequent. Finally, every actor in the thing — Michael B. Jordan (twice! he plays identical twins!), Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Wunmi Mosaku, Jayme Lawson — is very sexy and very talented. 

In short, Sinners is a good old-fashioned unpretentious Good Time At The Movies. A big costumey good-looking pulse-pounding genre drama for adults starring actors people like to watch. It’s Conclave-core. 

It is also a very Black movie, from the writer-director, to the cast, to the subject matter. It’s a story of the Jim Crow South of the sort that the federal government is attempting to purge and suppress. And it climaxes with the indelible image of Jordan, a movie star with billions at the box office under his belt, using a World War I sniper rifle and machine gun to slaughter an entire chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. The Grand Dragon getting riddled with bullets at point-blank range just offscreen is basically an applause line in this thing.