Sinners (2025) - 5/10

In the American Deep South, we meet Samuel (Miles Caron) in Mississippi. Picking cotton, playing guitar, worrying his Pastor father. When his cousins, twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both Michael B. Jordan) return to town with mob money in their tailored pockets and a plan to set up a juke joint, things are set up to get messy, but maybe not in the way you’re expecting. It’s in no hurry to get there though, there’s lots of back story, pitching the brothers checkered past of broken promises. Dusty roads and steel guitars, it has a tone, I’ll give it that, but the opening act feels a little clunky. The spiritualism of the people, the music, it’s not afraid to push convention. Mixed with cursed entrepreneurialism of the bothers, it takes a little time to find its feet, but as it begins to tease its ambition, it’s the introduction of Remmick (Jack O’Connell) that’s the spark. He’s not the Klan, he’s something else. It shares a bonkers twist with an older film, but I won’t spoil it as it does it with a touch more inventiveness and style, but all the promise of the second act is dashed. It’s fun and offers some novel twists to the genre, but when it comes down to it, it treads the same paths I’ve seen time and time again, remaining constrained by them, rather than breaking free. It doesn’t know what it wants to be and winds up a convoluted mess that doesn’t know when to quit. There is something here, it had promise, but perhaps makes its destination all the more frustrating.

5/10