Maressa Kaupp

I went into Sinners with high hopes. The trailer made it seem like it would be action-packed and centered around an engaging storyline between Michael B. Jordan and Hailee Steinfeld’s characters. Instead, it was a chaotic, underwhelming mess. The plot was all over the place. It started with heavy character development, only to kill those characters off with no payoff. Random Indian vampire hunters were introduced with no backstory, alongside a lone vampire whose motivations made no sense. why was he obsessed with music? Why was he being hunted? None of it was explained. The movie constantly jumped between past and future themes using music, which felt completely disconnected from what should have been a vampire-driven story. Michael B. Jordan gave a solid performance and had better chemistry with Hailee Steinfeld’s character than with Wunmi Mosaku’s character, but unfortunately both were wasted. The main vampire, Jack O'Connell, was forgettable, and his actions felt baseless. While the acting overall was decent, the terrible accents and cringy dialogue were distracting. Characters’ emotions flipped unnaturally, like everyone was written to be emotionally unstable. The movie dragged on unnecessarily, it could’ve easily cut the entire subplot involving the Indian vampire hunters, Sammie Moore’s backstory, Hailee’s character’s moms death, and other pointless scenes that didn’t add to the main plot. The pacing was terrible, and the script was worse. Visually, the movie was too dark and hard to follow. Faces were often obscured in important scenes. The only standout moment was a well-shot scene featuring Grace Chow, portrayed by Li Jun Li, walking between her two grocery stores but otherwise, the cinematography was forgettable. By the end, I felt completely underwhelmed. The movie failed to deliver on every promise the trailer made. The vampires looked cool, and Michael B. Jordan is nice to look at, but that’s about all this film has going for it. I wouldn’t recommend Sinners to anyone. I really don’t understand the high reviews.