Movies: Sinners

Sinners is director Ryan Coogler's first film not based on either real events (Fruitvale Station) or existing IP (Creed, Black Panther). I liked the movie overall, and it almost pains me to embed the trailer, since the less you know about it going in, the better:

Sinners has the same basic premise as one of my favorite flicks, From Dusk till Dawn, though Coogler is not (yet) as good an action director as Robert Rodriguez, or as good a screenwriter as Quentin Tarantino.  In both films, two criminal brothers (played by Michael B. Jordan) spend a night in a club besieged by vampires - bullets don't do much, but stakes and sunlight seem to work. Can they survive until dawn?

It's a great premise, but Sinners takes a long time to get going, and lacks the pacing, tension, and go-for-broke insanity of Rodriguez and Tarantino's classic. The cast is uniformly excellent, but they just don't have interesting things to do, aside from the musical numbers.

Musical numbers?! Yup, the trailer omits how critically important music is to the story, specifically old-school Delta blues and (amazingly) Irish folk songs. One of the main characters is played by newcomer Miles Caton, and the movie's worth watching for his musical performance alone:

Rating: 7/10