Everyone has been hyping this one up so much since its release and this once it’s absolutely justified. Not only is it far and away the best action movie of the year, it crosses genres and is as much a musical as a horror film. It looks and sounds fantastic, fearlessly imaginative while being grounded in the Jim Crow-era South and is perfectly paced. There’s actually not that much action, but when it arrives, it’s explosive and definitive. It’s what a blockbuster Hollywood movie should be and I only regret not catching it in the cinemas earlier.
After serving in World War 1 and making money as gangsters in Chicago, identical twin brothers Smoke and Stack return to their home town in the Mississippi Delta. Flush with cash, they buy a disused sawmill from a white man to open a juke joint and pick up their cousin Sammie, a talented musician, to perform there against the objections of the young man’s preacher father. In a rush to open their joint, they reconnect with old contacts in town: a Chinese shopkeeper couple as suppliers, the elderly pianist Delta Sim, Smoke’s wife Annie who he hasn’t seen in years as their cook and so on. Stack runs into his white ex-girlfriend Mary who he left partially to protect her from retribution from other whites. Meanwhile an apparent immigrant Remmick appears on the doorstep of a white couple begging for shelter. He turns out to be a vampire attracted by Sammie’s musical talent. He is being pursued by Choctaw hunter who give up on the chase when the sun sets even as Smoke and Stack’s joint opens for business.
Having been spoiled already about the film’s horror elements, I wasn’t exactly surprised by the appearance of vampires. What did surprise me is its earnestness about Sammie’s music being so powerful that it transcends time. The resulting scene of Sammie playing for the joint’s opening night is pure magic, as spirits representing musical styles of the both the past and the future freely mingle with the partying crowd. For me, it’s the moment when I realized that this film is truly something special, that anything and everything can happen and cut loose from any IP restrictions, Ryan Coogler feels free to do anything he damn well wants. Music is so central to this film that not only do the vampires sing and dance, there is absolutely no cringe in their performances and their Irish folk music serves as a counterpoint to the Blues music of the black people. Coogler takes his time to develop all of the characters and tell their backstories so that when they start dying, it means something. At the same time, the vampires demonstrate not only the classic traits of superhuman strength and speed, but they fully retain their memories and personalities that they had in life. This means that they’re intelligent and as my wife notes, that’s why they’re exceptionally scary as movie monsters.
When the vampires fail to gain access to the surviving humans through guile, they attempt persuasion instead and their pitch is actually an interesting one. Being intelligent, they’re aware of the oppression the black people continue to suffer in the US even after the ending of slavery. The deal they offer is that turning everyone into vampires would bring about a true brotherhood in which all are equals, especially since this particular version of vampirism seems to also involve some kind of hive mind. One can see why that is tempting when it’s combined with the promise of immortality with their loved ones. The film forcefully demonstrates that the characters prefer to free themselves on their own terms. It’s not that deep but it’s a novel take on both black empowerment and vampiric lore. The motivations of all of the characters make sense, ties in beautifully with the music and feels real in the context of its setting even with the fantastical elements. I’m even stoked that the film rejects the more convenient Christianity angle in favor of the Hoodou espoused by Annie.
As far as I’m concerned, this is just about perfect as a big screen cinematic spectacle. It has satisfying action that actually matters, great music, Michael B. Jordan knocks it out of the park playing both twin brothers and making each character distinctive, all the while being a fresh take on familiar concepts. Having watched this just on the heels of Frankenstein, it’s even more obvious how inferior del Toro’s adaptation is in just about every aspect.