Directing a film is a little like coaching a football team—both are jobs for natural leaders of men—but strikingly few auteurs played serious team sports after age 18.

Ron Shelton, director of the baseball movie Bull Durham, played five years of minor-league ball. Richard Linklater pitched in college until an injury switched his career trajectory from the athletic to the aesthetic. And Ryan Coogler, director of the giant Marvel hit Black Panther and now Sinners, caught 112 passes over four seasons as a wide receiver at mid-tier Sacramento State.

Coogler brings a jock’s conservative, focused mentality to his features, such as Creed, in which he deftly revived the Rocky franchise and gave Sylvester Stallone his best role since the original, by casting his serviceable leading man Michael B. Jordan, a theater kid who played basketball in high school, as the son of Rocky’s late rival and friend Apollo Creed.

Coogler’s next project is rebooting the right-coded The X-Files.

Granted, the hoopla during the Great Awokening over Black Panther’s portrayal of a comic-book black utopia was absurd. The New York Times proclaimed:

To the politically minded, the Wakanda of ‘Black Panther’ offers an almost too perfect rebuttal to President Trump’s comments in January in which he referred to African nations with a disparaging expletive.

Still, in extolling the virtues of an absolute monarchy tempered only by the right of other princes of the royal blood to challenge the king to a duel to the death, it was perhaps the most reactionary movie of the decade.

Coogler’s new <Sinners is, in many ways, an admirable film: a lavish, stylish, ambitious horror musical based on that rarity in 2025—original intellectual property. It’s gotten adoring reviews and made a respectable amount of money in its opening weekend. It will be of interest to white fans of the blues guitar.

Sinners is set in 1932 in Clarksdale, Miss., at the crossroads of Highway 61 where the legendary black blues guitarist Robert Johnson is said to have sold his soul to the devil, or perhaps to Papa Legba, the West African ioa of crossroads, for more skill with his instrument.

In reality, there’s no mention of any Faustian bargain in Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues,” which Eric Clapton famously covered in the 1960s. But somehow the story got started, and it’s been popular source material ever since, such as in the Charlie Daniels Band’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” For instance, in Walter Hill’s 1986 movie Crossroads, Ralph Macchio wins a guitar duel with a metal guitarist, who’d sold his soul to Satan, by relying upon his classical training.

In Coogler’s reimagining, which seems to borrow from Charlie Daniels’, Legba is instead an Irish demon who wants to steal the musical genius of the black guitarist.

Sinners takes place over a single day as identical twins Smoke and Stack (with Jordan playing both roles through use of what Charlie Kaufman’s identical twin Donald in Adaptation calls “trick photography”) roll back into their hometown after seven years of bootlegging for Al Capone in Chicago’s Bronzeville. Loaded with cash, which they may have stolen from the Outfit, they open a juke joint and book their young cousin, a Robert Johnson-like blues prodigy, to play that night.

Usually, movies portray identical twins as having radically different personalities to let actors show off their range (e.g., Nicolas Cage’s Charlie Kaufman is brilliant, neurotic, and unlikable, while his Donald Kaufman is dim, happy-go-lucky, and lovable). Sinners’ twins are more realistic: highly similar in affect, but not exactly the same. Smoke is more responsible and Stack is more raffish.

Coogler, an audience-friendly director, considerately gives Smoke a blue cap and Stack a red fedora to help you tell them apart, but it’s still a fair amount of work keeping track of which twin is which when trying to follow the plot. Combined with the old-fashioned black accents, which took me about an hour to get familiar with, you might well want to wait for Sinners to appear on streaming with subtitles.

The first hour is a fairly solid drama as the prodigal twins drive around town spending lavishly to get their nightclub ready for its grand opening. Nothing too exciting happens, but I like well-made movies about entrepreneurs launching a business.

Then it turns into a vampire-zombie movie, with the devil speaking sometimes with an Irish brogue for unexplained reasons.

So, why doesn’t Sinners quite live up to its potential?

First, Coogler doesn’t have much of a sense of humor. In Sinners, only Delroy Lindo as a drunken old blues man is much fun.

Second, the acoustic Delta blues (and even their postwar descendant, the electric Chicago blues), while vastly influential on 1960s–70s rock, aren’t really that entertaining. (Trust me, during my eighteen years in Chicago, I tried to get into the blues but just couldn’t.) In movies, the blues rely inordinately on reaction shots of listeners grooving to the sound because what you can hear is pretty ho-hum. What 1960s white musicians like Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin were able to do with this rather rudimentary style remains remarkable.

Third, Sinners is a horror movie that just isn’t scary.

I don’t review many horror movies because I don’t like being frightened. (Your tastes may be less wimpy.) But I was fine with Sinners because it’s not fear-inducing at all.

Sure, a lot of gory stuff happens during the horror part of the movie, but none of it is in the least bit terrifying.

Why not?

For one thing, vampires are intensely European and aristocratic, so they don’t work well in a rural African-American movie.

On the other hand, Haitian zombies would seem more congenial subject matter. After all, a major reason that Haiti has so much more of a self-destructive culture than other Caribbean countries like the Dominican Republic or Jamaica is that it obtained its independence before the end of the Atlantic slave trade in roughly 1807–1830. This allowed its neighbors, and even some West African countries, to more thoroughly Christianize over the course of the 19th century after being deprived of the fresh flow of voodoo practitioners from West Africa long before independence solidified their cultural matrix.

So, Haiti has stayed more superstitious.

For example, the key figure in 20th-century Haitian politics, the black-power dictator Papa Doc Duvalier, was able to use his resemblance to the demon Baron Samedi to convince the masses of his occult powers. But Duvalier, an M.D. with a public health degree from the U. of Michigan, believed in voodoo himself. Fearing that a rival could transform himself into a black dog, in 1968 Duvalier had his Tonton Macoute bullyboys kill all the black dogs in the capital.

So there are horrifying (if also comic) aspects to West African superstition.

But Coogler, a racial loyalist, isn’t going to go there. Hence, there’s nothing terrifying in Sinners. For instance, Smoke’s ex-wife sells hoodoo fetishes, but she only uses her roots and spells to protect the community, not to let her customers hex their rivals.

And finally, Coogler, for all his directorial skill, is a little too much of a healthy-minded all-American football-hero type to get the most mileage out of this material.

Then, after the vampire zombie attacks are over, Coogler tacks on a perfunctory scene in which the Ku Klux Klan attacks. But Coogler is more pro-black than antiwhite, so this part is uninspired (unlike, say, Jordan Peele’s Get Out). Fortunately, there’s a fun post-credits scene involving 88-year-old Chicago blues guitarist Buddy Guy, so stick around.

What I would have done with Sinners’ premise is throw out all the horror nonsense and instead have Al Capone follow Smoke and Stack home to get his money back. Just as the Chicago gangsters point their tommy guns at the heavily armed black revelers, the Klan arrives. But the KKK can’t decide whether they hate uppity blacks or alien Catholic mobsters more, leading to a triangular Mexican standoff in the tradition of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.