Opened over the weekend: Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s tale of twin brothers Smoke and Stack, back from Capone’s Chicago and trying to start up a juke joint in rural Mississippi in the early ’30s. They have the building, and they have the talent for the grand opening, a blues guitar and vocal prodigy named Sammie. They have the booze, the catfish, everything. But they haven’t counted on the party being crashed by singing vampires.
Both of the brothers, the badass Smoke and the more jovial Stack, are played by Michael B. Jordan, via seamless trickery. Sammie is played by the deep-voiced, genuinely prodigal Miles Caton. Delroy Lindo is reliable as ever as the veteran bluesman backing Sammie up, Wunmi Mosaku is magisterial as a local witch who comes in handy, Jack O’Connell is scary as the leader of the bloodsuckers, Hailee Steinfeld has a tragic tinge as Smoke’s biracial former lover, and the supporting cast is full of vivid players.
In this crazy blend of the Evil Dead flicks and From Dusk Till Dawn with Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? Coogler generates a potently menacing yet sultry period atmosphere well before the supernatural elements even make their appearance. Then as the vampires lay siege to the joint, they launch into an Irish folk number, maybe the creepiest vampiric dance since Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers back in 1967.
Despite all these apparent influences, Sinners is a true original. The spiritual power of music is the theme of the movie; its ability to uplift and transcend and comfort, and also the inevitability with which the forces of evil will try to co-opt that power. I can’t recall another horror picture with this for a theme. Sinners is perhaps overambitious at times, but in a good way, down to its absurdly touching epilogue; the movie is overstuffed with terrific acting and marvelous music, and a big heart.
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A vampire blues musical doesn’t sound nearly as a crazy, however, as an animated kids’ movie featuring talking sneakers. But here we are. Also opening over the weekend is Sneaks, directed by Rob Edwards and Chris Jenkins from a script by Edwards, about the adventures of a pair of designer running shoes.
One of the pair, voiced by Anthony Mackie, is content to be a collector’s pampered display specimen; his sister, voiced by Chloe Bailey, believes that sneakers are meant to be worn. After the pair is won in a raffle by young Edson (Swae Lee), they are stolen by an obsessive collector (Laurence Fishburne), then get separated. A discarded, beat-up sneaker voiced by Martin Lawrence takes the adventurous sneaker under his wing, or his lace or whatever, and tries to help her reunite with her brother in time for Edson to wear them in a midnight basketball tournament.
That’s actually a considerable simplification of the twisty, character-filled plot, which includes a high-tech supervillain, swarms of rats, a Greek chorus of sneakers hanging from the telephone wires, and a cameo by former Phoenix Suns great Chris Paul. But you get the idea.
The shape of a sneaker doesn’t really lend itself comfortably to anthropomorphic treatment, but the movie gamely tries, using the laces as forelimbs and placing the mouth in the toe and so forth. It isn’t too much sillier, I suppose, than the characters in Cars or Planes, and any movie that includes the trash talk, “Your mama is from Payless!” deserves some credit.
