I heard so much great stuff about this movie while it was in theatres, and was excited to watch it on streaming. So while my take is that it’s pretty good — basically fine, solidly above average — that ends up feeling like a real disappointment due to the hype.

The fundamental problem is that it starts as one kind of movie — a story of the Black South in 1932 — and then swerves into something totally different. It’s about two men who return to their hometown after fighting in the war and running with Capone’s gangs in Chicago. They were apparently badasses before they left, and now they’re back with more money and attitude. Watching them rejoin the community, reconnect with old flames, friends, enemies — it’s great stuff. The movie spends the first two-thirds on this, slowly building up to them launching a juke joint with a big party for everyone.

It’s interesting. The acting’s great (Michael B. Jordan plays two similar-but-distinct characters), the ensemble cast works, there’s a real sense of place. I was invested.

And then… it turns into a mediocre vampire movie.

This might’ve worked if the twist were a surprise, like Psycho or something — but it’s in all the marketing, to the point that it barely counts as a spoiler.

And without the element of shock, it just doesn’t work for me. The character conflicts that had been built up get resolved mostly in blood. Okay, maybe that’s a metaphor for WWI or the violence inflicted on Black communities or something — but as a literal story, it’s just not satisfying.

Worse, the vampire stuff is kind of sloppy. There’s this heavily foreshadowed idea that music is magical… and then it pops up precisely once and is never referenced again. The vampires themselves suffer from the classic problem of being both “the demon who killed your friend” (as memorably stated in the first episode of Buffy) and “basically your friend, just more of a bloodthirsty asshole now.” The movie ping-pongs between these interpretations depending on what feels most interesting in the moment, with no real internal logic.

The actual vampire-fighting scenes are dull, too. Some characters die instantly, to show how unstoppable the vampires are… except then other characters hold them off easily. There’s zero consistency.

Also, in some action sequences and dramatic moments, the aspect ratio shifts to an “IMAX” format — aka, fills the whole screen. I super hate this. The movie was framed with that aspect ratio for an actual IMAX theatre, where the screen physically surrounds your vision and you don’t notice the edges, which means that they don’t put anything near the top and bottom. But on a TV, that spacious framing means it just feels weirdly empty. My wife commented on the opening scene looking bad — she thought it was “bad CG,” but I think she was reacting to that weird openness, like the car was driving down the center of a strangely barren frame. Coogler apparently did this on purpose, so it’s not HBO Max butchering it — but I think it was a bad call. In regular theatres, it would’ve had a consistent (wide) aspect ratio. In real IMAX, the switch would make sense. On a TV, though, it just doesn’t work.

Anyway, after watching this, I went back and looked at more of the glowing reviews, and it turns out a lot of people were saying things like “I haven’t liked a movie this much since Fury Road.” Probably they also liked Andor. So maybe if you’re someone who really loves “elevated genre” stuff, this will hit hard for you.

But for me? It was fine. I enjoyed it well enough, I guess. But it feels like a missed opportunity.