Sinners

For years I've been emphasizing the importance of music in movies; how an amazing musical score can significantly elevate a movie. It shouldn't just be background dressing. It should be brought to the forefront. It should drive the story. It should be a character in itself. It should give you goosebumps in the big moments. Sinners is one of the best examples of this.

Aside from the music, I could tell I was watching high-quality filmmaking within five minutes. The directing, camerawork, editing, and sound design are pristine. The entire cast does a great job, but Michael B. Jordan shines. He is a superstar.

Sinners is also surprisingly funny, without taking away from the seriousness. And the horror elements are... satisfying. This movie goes hard.

(2 viewings, opening night IMAX 4/17/2025, 11/21/2025)

I really thought I was going to love Sinners even before I saw the glowing reviews, but after seeing so much hype I was really excited. Unfortunately my expectations weren't even close to being met.

Not a whole lot happens in this movie, to describe the plot would only take one sentence. The filming was done well and the music elevated the overall film but it just falls flat and it left me feeling unsatisfied. I expected more from this and wish it had been as entertaining as I was promised.

The plot for this movie is pretty much lifted from Dusk to Dawn. You introduce a handful of characters and get them all to a single location where they are then attacked by vampires. Sinners is much slower, more of a William Faulkner version of a vampire movie. The production design and cinematography are excellent. The cast is very good. The music is good. Everything about this production top notch.

However, I struggled to get through this. There were many long scenes where the dialogue became cumbersome. It felt like the whole movie was a slow burn moving toward a rousing climax of horror, but when they got there it was underwhelming. It never delivered the scares or the sense of danger.

I saw the ratings for this film and I watched really looking forward to watching it. Even the people who work the counters in the cinema assured us of how good it was.

The first half of the film have the makings of an 8/10 film, and it seems like it's going to go that way, especially with such a good cast. But as with most films these days, it takes a turn and gets quite daft in the second half. Somewhat like Dusk til Dawn, but not half as good...But that's just my opinion.

Go watch it, but at least give it an honest review. It's not an 8/10 movie as iMDB has it scored. I scored it a 6, which I think is fair.

I love it when movies mix different genres and create a fresh spin on old themes. In this case however the different elements didn't mix well in my opinion: I would describe sinners as a mix between period gangster drama, musical and trashy B-movie horror. This sounds super exciting on paper, but in reality it threw me off completely. I feel like the movie tries to do everything at the same time but doesn't deliver on many of those aspects: It wants to hit the viewer on an emotional level but left me personally completely cold - I didn't care who died or who lived; The movie kinda wants to be scary but the "enemies" in the film feel like a complete joke from the first scene they are shown and it takes away all the tension; It wants to be action-packed and explosive, but the fight scenes are kinda boring and left me wanting to move on to more serious scenes again, even though those serious scenes are kind of a slow burn; The film wants to be funny and even though it made me chuckle a bit it never really took it far enough to justify sacrificing the big threat in the film for laughs.

In conclusion: This movie is too boring and slow to be an entertaining action-comedy and doesn't take the humor and fight scenes far enough to really have an impact. At the same time this movie is far too ridiculous to be a serious scary and emotional movie that reaches you on any kind of emotional level.

I would have liked it, if they would have sacrificed the humor for building a serious threat that feels genuinely scary and terrifying. The cinematography, costumes and music are fantastic but this is just not enough for me to make it a good film, when the story is not hitting. There are single parts of the movie that I absolutely loved and I would have really appreciated those scenes as standalone music videos, but it just doesn't mix well with the rest in my personal opinion.

In addition to my previous criticisms I spotted some typical clichés in the dialogue writing that made me roll my eyes and there were some moments where I found it extremely hard to believe that certain characters survived. I could go in to detail here but I want to keep my review vague to avoid spoilers.

To me watching this movie felt a bit like eating chocolate on a burger - Both elements are nice by themselves but together they don't make for a nice meal.