Ryan Coogler’s highly anticipated horror adventure “Sinners” had a strong opening weekend. The film grossed $45.6 million domestically and $61 million worldwide, beating out “A Minecraft Movie” to top the box office. The movie’s global debut total is the most any original movie has earned during its opening weekend in the entirety of the 2020s so far. It even scored an impressive 98% with Rotten Tomatoes’ critics and 97% approval from viewers.
Viewers couldn’t get enough of the viral one-liners either, including, “We gonna kill every last one of you,” and “We’ve been gone a long time. We back now.” But others are taking a more critical approach to the Michael B. Jordan-led film.
TikTok user @hennymedia took to the platform to share how, “Sinners was a great time... I thought it was a really engaging narrative, for the most part — very well-acted, well-produced, well-choreographed, well-directed,” but had a thing or two to say about the writing.
“Anytime anyone takes on magical realism, I can’t shut off my critic brain whenever I’m watching it,” he began. “ ‘Sinners’ approached the mark, flirted with it... but never fully embraced it.” He admitted he’s “just picky,” but picked on how “the first hour of the movie was involved in so much exposition I feel like I didn’t need. ‘Sinners’ is doing a lot to track the lineage of Black American music and its relationship to whiteness. I felt like they could’ve really used valuable world building instead of exposition for some characters that felt like in some moments were a lil’ too stock.”
He wanted the movie to show the difference between “what is secular and what is fully associated with the Black church,” in reference to Sammie, whose story he says wasn’t complete. “The way Sammie is singing at the venue is not the way you’d be singing at church,” he added. He wanted an earlier scene in the movie to display Sammie’s “vulnerability in church... [that] would’ve made it more a complete narrative.”
One content creator asked his viewers, “How can somebody invite a vampire into your home? They don’t pay no bills, [they] not on no deed. I thought I had to invite them into my home, not my guest get to invite them into my home. That don’t make sense! You can’t invite somebody to my crib and I don’t know about it.”
Another TikTok user admitted she “f*****g hated ‘Sinners.’ I am so disappointed. ... When I say it’s so f*****g boring. It’s too much going on, make the storylines connect, make it make sense! It was trying to be too educated, just be a vampire movie!”
One user slammed negative online reviewers who admitted they “just didn’t get it.” She reasoned, “It’s because you just didn’t want to get it. It’s because you not ‘getting it’ in your everyday life. Because the messages were very loud and very clear.” Mic drop.