Michael B. Jordan plays identical twins opening a juke joint in 1930s Mississippi, in this blues-based vampire-western they should have called Michael B. Goode.

Ryan Coogler spends the impressive first act setting up a good-looking world populated by interesting characters, before trapping them in a lazy vampire B-movie that drains every last drop of goodwill built up by Coogler’s pedigree and Jordan’s likeability. The film hints at various intriguing directions, including race-based monster movie and anachronistic musical, but goes down the latter-day Tarantino route of just doing a shootout in a historical setting.

Coogler’s adherence to horror clichés means the vampires have to be invited in, and the characters need to be dumb enough to do so, which makes the hour we spent getting to know them feel like a waste of time. If the film had gone off the deep end into genre madness halfway through it may at least have succeeded as schlock, but after introducing the blues vamps at the end of act one it trundles embarrassed towards a bafflingly amateurish ending.

Sinners feels like a project Coogler should have gotten out of his system before being snapped up for the Creed and Black Panther franchises, when a tighter focus might have benefited its mashup of Blade and blues. But when allowed to swim in muddled waters for more than two hours, the weak material is stretched thin over its pair of Jordans.