Wooden acting, obvious stage fighting, and odd pacing can be forgiven in the sort of B movies that One Spoon of Chocolate draws on. Those rough edges differentiate them from the production-line smoothness of more mainstream fare and can even add a chintzy charm. But because RZA’s film never delivers on the things those films do well—exciting action, gnarly thrills, a general sense of cool—they just make the whole thing feel amateurish.
A young Black man named Lonnie (Isaiah R. Hill) is minding his own business one night in Karensville, Ohio, when he’s jumped by a group of masked, baseball bat-wielding men. He wakes up, briefly, in a room filled with images of the slave trade while a white surgeon carefully harvests his organs. This cold open announces One Spoon of Chocolate as the latest film to try and emulate Jordan Peele’s Get Out, and one of the least successful. Not only is its social commentary utterly one-dimensional, it strips all the mystery from its tale by showing us exactly what the bad guys are up to, leaving us with nothing to do but wait until the film’s actual protagonist figures it out. Which takes a surprisingly long time.
That protagonist is Randy “Unique” Jackson (Shameik Moore), an army veteran who’s just been released from prison. Unique is immediately framed as the Black John Rambo—a man whose quiet manners and thousand-yard stare hide a deep well of rage. It’s a rage that he’s trying very hard to keep a handle on, which isn’t easy given how people keep pushing him. It’s a big ask for Moore, whose best performances to date are as gentler, more nebbish figures like Dope’s Malcom and Miles from the Spider-Verse films. He struggles to muster the sort of gravitas and physical presence required for an inward figure like Unique to hold the screen.
Unique has a connection to Lonnie that could easily serve as his motivation for revenge, but One Spoon of Chocolate puts another character through the exact same gruesome procedure anyway. Once he does set his mind on revenge, he takes inspiration from a survivalist manual and begins building himself an arsenal of improvised weapons, a process that the film likewise feels the need to cut back to on numerous separate occasions. These redundant repetitions drain all the momentum out of what should be a lean, mean action thriller.
And the slower it moves, the more obvious One Spoon of Chocolate’s deficiencies become. While Moore suffers from being slightly miscast, a lot of the other performances are simply bad, with the actors delivering their lines like they’re reading them off a teleprompter. Things don’t get much better when the talking stops and the fight scenes take over, which might have felt less lethargic if you couldn’t clearly see the punches (and baseball bat swings) being pulled.
We know that Unique is a student of kung-fu, and the film seems to be trying to be aiming for the exaggerated elegance of a wuxia film in some moments, the grimly realistic bloodletting of a grindhouse movie in others. Consequently, it ends up in a dead zone between the two where the fights have neither the tang of real violence nor the balletic sweep of stylized combat. Some of the action in the final showdown is a little more kinetic, but none of it is especially memorable.
It’s clear, all throughout One Spoon of Chocolate, that RZA loves all the types of movies that he’s paying homage to. As a musician he was able to channel his love of wuxia into a groundbreaking new rap form. As a filmmaker, though, he still seems unsure quite how to wield those influences.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
