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Sing Sing Movie Review

Sing Sing is a 2024 drama film directed by Greg Kwedar and starring Colman Domingo. It is one of the most overrated movies of the year.

Imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, Divine G finds purpose by acting in a theatre group alongside other incarcerated men, including a wary newcomer. The plot behind this movie is actually a strong one. The idea is a sound one and the fact that it’s based on a true prison program lent it a lot of authenticity. The majority of the cast being comprised of real life people who were formerly incarcerated also helped that realism significantly.

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But the overall concept of art helping you emotionally and psychologically is a very familiar one. Just this year we saw a similar subject in an indie film ‘Ghostlight’. Whereas that one was about art helping you overcome grief, Sing Sing is about art healing and redeeming you from your past mistakes. Again, I do find the idea behind this program and its intentions valuable, but the movie as a whole was problematic on multiple fronts.

My main issue is its tone. I could never stand the self-serious, self-important dialogue in any film and here that smugness went through the roof. The protagonist himself practically was oozing smugness from beginning to end. I love Colman Domingo and he was definitely very good here, but his character was not particularly strong. The characterization on this movie is so mediocre that it seriously hurt the entire story in the process.

None of them could be properly developed due to the script’s insistence to focus more on theater scenes than on building these people as real characters. The performances are uniformly good, but the character development was frustratingly weak. It did not help that this is one of those Hollywood movies where everybody would whisper throughout.

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I hated that never-ending whispering. It fitted that conceited tone and it further aggravated me as a viewer. Sing Sing is well shot, solidly directed and it features a strong message for sure, but the tone is terrible and the documentarian approach only made me question whether this should have been a narrative film in the first place. Had it been a documentary, I would have appreciated it much more, but this way I was bored and frustrated with it.