For an original film meant to mark Ryan Coogler’s long-awaited return from the coldest reaches of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Sinners exhibits many of the hallmarks—and the shortcomings—of the archetypal late-period Marvel movie.

Like Black Panther, Coogler’s uniquely respectable foray into the MCU, Sinners begins with a clunkily expository animated overture, builds to an underwhelming action sequence between two indistinguishable characters, and culminates with a slow-motion pileup of endings that, despite the inclusion of a mid-credit sequence and a post-credit sequence, still feel rushed, unearned, gratuitous yet insubstantial. Even after the theater lights come on, the ecstatic critical and audience consensus attending Sinners recalls the cognitive dissonance of staggering out of “Phase 3” Marvel movies in the 2010s, back when the most resistant-to-criticism chapters in the Disney-owned comic book studio’s brainwashing playbook were written.

Independent of any critical reactions, Sinners is an objectively fascinating wide-release curiosity. At its best, it’s a pretty one-of-a-kind mad scientist experiment in genre-splicing; at its worst, it’s under-considered, sloppy, self-serious, and woefully corny. These imperfections, glaring but not disqualifying, are also pitched at the precise register of not-great that convinces fanboys of all denominations that they’re glimpsing brilliance. As if to confirm the paralells, Sinners is printing historic, Marvel-level amounts of money at the American box office.

The unsubtle ways that Sinners formally borrows and deviates from Marvel movies are intentional on Coogler’s part, obviously. Half Prohibition Era black gangster crime drama, half Jordan Peele-style race horror elevated B-movie, the admirable creative challenge that Coogler has set for himself is to jam-pack two mismatched career reclamation projects into a space designed to accommodate one. While these innate asymmetries are what make Sinners worth watching, groans and all, they tend to undermine the sense that the writer-director is in full control of his story, characters, world-building, metaphors, political messaging, and their intended cumulative effects.

The takeaway from Sinners should be that Ryan Coogler is too talented of a director, too consummate of an artist, to waste his time on cash-in nonsense like Wakanda Forever anymore. But in his desperate attempt to prove that point (true as it may be), he has devoted his talent and resources to a half-realized movie that suggests his craft and instincts have slightly regressed since Fruitvale Station and Creed, the excellent films that a decade ago positioned him as one of the most exciting writer-directors of the millennial generation.

Is Sinners better than Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania? Yes. But is it more dramatically exciting and competently produced than your above-average blockbuster, your Iron Man or Top Gun: Maverick? If, hypothetically, the pre-Black Panther Ryan Coogler had been given $90 million to paint his masterpiece, would Sinners have been the result? Or is Sinners just what hurdles the dirt-low bar for daring, masterful, ambitious filmmaking for critics and audiences in 2025? How’s this for grand sweeping ambition: The entire movie takes place on one street and then in a barn.

Before the barn, before the one street, Sinners is expressly about characters, like the director who dreamed them up, returning to their roots after a long, arduous time away. In a movie that sometimes seems confused about whether it’s a star vehicle or an ensemble film, the closest thing to protagonists are “Smoke” and “Stack,” twin brothers played by Michael B. Jordan and Michael B. Jordan, respectively. You might presume that a movie with halves this wildly incongruous would be anchored by twins with distinctly different characteristics, personalities, worldviews; think again. Jordan’s performance differentiates the twins with a contrived subtlety that borders on imperceptibility, leaving the costume designers to designate each twin for the audience in the manner of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. Smoke wears red, Stack blue (unless it’s the other way around1).

After getting shellshocked in World War I, the twins moved to Chicago to find their fortune in the city’s criminal underbelly. Now they have come back to their hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi, the birthplace of the blues, with a boatload of cash and a truckload of stolen Irish beer and Italian wine. They purchase an abandoned barn from the local KKK grand wizard, a story wrinkle that the movie forgets about for the next two hours. Their plan is to convert the space into a juke joint, throw a party for their friends, make enough money to throw another one.

The rest of the first half of Sinners is an arthouse-deliberate team-assembling montage reminiscent of The Avengers, complete with each newly introduced character having precisely one special skill and precisely one backstory trauma. A bartender whose baby died. A harmonica player who can’t quit the hooch. There’s the husband and wife shop owners with past-due rent bills and an overstock of catfish heads, and the young virtuoso guitarist whose father is a preacher certain that the blues is Satan’s music. “Well, well, well,” they all say to Smoke and Stack. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

After a few fun conversations about eating pussy, Sinners audaciously morphs into a single-setting vampire movie whose static location does little to clarify its stances on the exploitative contract of assimilation, the corrupting influence of commerce on art, music or race or religiosity. This unevenness isn’t done any favors by ADR’d lines (“Better the devil you know…), choppy editing that sends bodies teleporting around the barn between shots, or decision-making from the characters that defies the basic fantastical logic of this specific vampire movie and the genre going back to Dracula.

By the film’s fourth ending, the earnestness of the crime drama has weakened too much of the B-movie, and the B-movie has done the same for the crime drama. Instead of engaging with the high-minded ideas teased over the film’s runtime, you’re left asking fundamental questions about why it’s led by twins in the first place, or what its 50 other cool-in-theory decisions are trying to mean. You feel as confused as the movie’s vampires as they stand on the banks of a lake watching the sunrise, somehow unaware that its rays will turn them to molten ash, killing them dead.

A possible explanation: Since the beginning of 2025, the studio that produced and distributed Sinners, Warner Bros., has somehow released three separate “auteur-driven” films that feature male movie stars playing multiple lead roles. There were Robert Pattison’s disposable clones in Mickey 17, Robert Deniro’s warring mobsters in The Alto Knights, and now the Smokestack Twinz in Sinners. It’s a strange and notable trend, one that potentially has a lot to impart about evolving audience tastes, the streaming wars effects on traditional studios, and, perhaps most of all, the depraved mind of David Zaslav, the bloodsucking CEO who helms Warner Bros.

Most likely, focus group data suggested that CGI-twinsies test well with Warner Bros.’s target demos, and the gimmick is cheaper than producers having to attach (and pay) a second marquee name. In actuality, though, Mickey 17 and The Alto Knights and Sinners are built around a movie star acting against an absence onto which the flimsy illusion of a human being has been pasted. Though Sinners comes closest, none of these three films measures up to their directors’ earlier work. Doubling your lead actor doesn’t double the likelihood of making something recognizably and movingly human; it might cut it in half.

Another angle from which to analyze this weird CGI twin phenomenon is how it speaks to the schizophrenia, the divided head and heart, of being a successful filmmaker in an age when vampires like David Zaslav can run movie studios. As an honest look behind the scenes of Sinners would reveal Michael B. Jordan emoting against a body double with a green stocking on his head, a clear-eyed look at Ryan Coogler’s triumphant return to original filmmaking would show that, regardless of the spirited posturing to the contrary, he has traded in serving the bottomline of the Walt Disney Company for serving the bottomline of Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. A devil’s bargain is a devil’s bargain.

In that regard, Coogler and his fans might want to take a second glance at the alleged salvation they’re offering and receiving here. His last movie was called Wakanda Forever, not In Wakanda Temporarily, and forever isn’t ending anytime soon. Only lost souls can look around at the purgatory of mediocrity and think themselves in heaven.

Share

Numerical Score for Numbskulls

3.25 Blues Guitars on Fire out of 5 🎸