One Spoon Of Chocolate Is A Charmingly Messy Blaxploitation Throwback
RZA's newest revenge-thriller has its fair share of issues, but it's just as abrasive and unique as his music.
When Enter The Wu-Tang first dropped over 30 years ago, part of the reason why it was such an immediately captivating success is because it was a sound no one had heard, created through a synthesis of inspirations unique to nine twenty-somethings from Staten Island. Classic boom-bap beats provided the foundation for production that was lo-fi and grimy in a way that echoed the urban soul of New York City, all framed around samples from exported works of classic martial arts cinema like Enter the Dragon and Five Deadly Venoms. To this day it’s still one of the most celebrated albums of all-time, not because the Wu-Tang Clan was trying to evoke what worked on the charts at the time, but because it was a passionate endeavor that stood against the grain of the mainstream and embraced multiple textures and genres that they found meaningful and exciting.
That same Frankenstein-esque artistic ethos can be found in One Spoon of Chocolate, the new revenge-thriller written and directed by the RZA himself, aka Prince Rakeem, aka Robert Diggs. The second film from the hip-hop icon to be presented by his longtime mentor Quentin Tarantino, the movie’s heady brew of different cinematic influences can be felt from the very opening — the uncomfortable brutality of ‘70s grindhouse cinema and the fight choreography of contemporary martial arts action and a drifting, immensely capable hero that feels ripped straight from a neo-Western. All of it collides in a project that’s as singular and idiosyncratic as a Wu-Tang album, with ideas bursting at the seams — for better and worse.
As if to acclimate audiences to its genre-shifting nature, One Spoon of Chocolate begins with an innocuous enough scene that quickly spirals into a nightmare: A young Black athlete walking home alone is picked up by a group of party girls, but when they stop at a gas station so he can buy some alcohol, their car vanishes when he returns, replaced by a pick-up truck filled with white men in masks wielding baseball bats. They beat him savagely before dropping him off in a sterile, makeshift doctor’s office, where we watch in horror and anger as his organs are removed, bagged, and stored in a fridge. It’s an opening that feels like an intentional homage to Get Out with less studio polish and more of an exploitation edge.
After that, we meet Randy ‘Unique’ Joneson (Shameik Moore), an Army veteran and freshly released convict who convinces his parole officer, Mr. Beem (Blair Underwood), to let him travel to the small town of Karensville, Ohio so he can stay with his cousin Ramsee (RJ Cyler), who just so happens to be related to the murdered young man from the beginning. Shameik Moore, the voice actor for Miles Morales in the Spider-Verse films, is a capable actor, but here he can’t quite shake the youthful energy of that role to properly embody Unique as the world-weary, imposing figure of righteous violence the movie eventually requires him to become. However, his brotherly camaraderie with RJ Cyler’s Ramsee is the best part of the first act — they feel incredibly natural as young adults who reconnect and gleefully retreat back into the nostalgia of their adolescence.
Although it takes the film awhile to get going, the chemistry between Shameik Moore and RJ Cyler is an early highlight.
But of course, the warmth and simplicity of their reunion can’t last: while the two of them are playing basketball at the rec center, a fight breaks out between the cousins and a gang of violent white supremacists, the leader of which, Jimmy (Harry Goodwins), is the son of Sheriff McLeoud (Michael Harney). After being humiliated on their own turf by Ramsee and Unique, the racists regroup and attack them again later while the two are spending a night with Ramsee’s girlfriend Aretha (Emyri Crutchfield) and her best friend Darla (Paris Jackson) — and it’s the second attack that marks an explosive escalation in the film and sets Unique on a collision course with the architects of the horrific murder that kickstarted the movie.
The lineage of the Blaxploitation film pumps throughout One Spoon of Chocolate’s veins, from the “revenge against a corrupt system” structure found in movies like Superfly and Coffy to the cartoonish one-dimensionality of its violent racists. The film’s screenplay is as heavy-handed as the titular iron fists in RZA’s first directorial outing, with dialogue as in-your-face as Wu-Tang’s characteristically aggressive production. But there are creative choices that, while maybe not subtle, reflect a thoughtfulness in how Diggs employs his images — old paintings depicting the Atlantic Slave Trade become a recurring image motif in the film, implying a direct link between the history of slavery and medical racism as another form of anti-Black dehumanization (the film’s depiction of organ harvesting might seem extreme but it’s based in a real wave of grave-digging from the 1800s that saw countless Black people dug up for their organs and scientific research).
If you just added a funk score, One Spoon of Chocolate would fit snugly in the orginal 70s Blaxploitation wave.
It’s clear that RZA is trying to convey a lot in an action movie that clocks in at an hour and 50 minutes (and the pacing makes itself felt for much of it), and while that’s a commendable aspiration, it also leaves some aspects feeling thin. Beyond just the villains, most of the characters come away feeling rather flat, and even though she’s pretty central to the conflict of the movie, Aretha simply floats through the story mostly as comic relief. Darla ends up serving as Unique’s love interest in a romantic subplot that’s just too underwritten to feel anything but limp in the middle of a movie that doesn’t really need one.
As far as the action goes, One Spoon of Chocolate understandably makes the audience wait for Unique to go full Rambo, stacking up the injustices until the audience is practically on their hands and knees begging for him to go crack some skulls. And once it finally does arrive in the form of a one-man siege on a warehouse of crooked cops and criminals, it’s just as much of a mixed-bag as the rest of the film — the fight choreography is brutal with no-frills, as Unique mercilessly beats his enemies with makeshift brass knuckles and engages in baseball bat swordfights, but the Bourne-esque shaky cam often misses the mark on immersion and gets in the way of us watching the carnage unfold. And just when it feels like the movie has hit its stride, narrowing the scope to a one-on-one physical and ideological face-off between Unique and Jimmy, it just… ends, with a gunshot and an abrupt cut to black. In a more concise movie, one that felt more urgent and used its runtime more economically, this might be a bold and fitting move, but here the resolution feels a little unsatisfying, as if RZA didn’t quite know how to write himself out of a corner.
Although how much can you complain about seeing racists getting smacked around with a hammer?
Even with its flaws though, One Spoon of Chocolate is a serviceable throwback to a less neat and more dangerous era of action and genre cinema, and although it’s far from perfect, it certainly proves that The Abbot has the creativity and ingenuity of a filmmaker in his veins.
In an era where blockbuster action movies have become an endless conveyor belt of superhero flicks or high-concept comedies, it’s refreshing to see something so small and scrappy reject comfortability and deliver an experience that’s at times chilling, uncomfortable, incisive, and cathartic in its own way.
