Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: RZA
Starring: Shameik Moore, Blair Underwood, RJ Cyler, Paris Jackson, Emyri Crutchfield, Michael Harney, Harry Goodwins
Famously a connoisseur of grindhouse cinema, RZA combines two classic American exploitation genres - blaxploitation and hicksploitation - for his latest turn as writer/director, One Spoon of Chocolate. In my review of Jeremy Saulnier's small town thriller Rebel Ridge I mentioned how if that movie had been made in the '70s it would have climaxed with its African-American hero massacring his white foes to a funky soundtrack. That's exactly what we get here, as RZA isn't afraid of upsetting anyone with this confrontational, racialised revenge fantasy.
Like Rebel Ridge, One Spoon of Chocolate's hero is a black military veteran. Having served time for an assault while protecting his neighbour, Unique (Shameik Moore) is released from prison on parole. After keeping his nose clean for a while in a veteran's shelter, Unique's parole officer (Blair Underwood, who somehow stopped aging three decades ago) allows him to return to his hometown of Karensville, Ohio.
As its name suggests, Karensville is home to the worst white people imaginable. Young black men are regularly murdered by a gang of racist thugs headed by the son of the town's crooked sheriff, and their organs are then removed and sold on the black market. The latest victim is Unique's teenage cousin, whom we see brutally attacked in the film's prologue.
Unique is the classic grindhouse hero who vows to keep out of trouble until he's pushed too hard. That moment comes when he's enjoying shooting hoops with his cousin (RJ Cyler) at the local community centre and the aforementioned racist meatheads show up. Leaving the yobs with bloodied noses and bruised egos, Unique finds himself their number one target. He hides out in the barn of a sympathetic white woman (Paris Jackson), but when he loses another cousin to the racist organ traffickers Unique decides he has no choice but to take violent revenge.
The movie takes its name from a scene in which Unique moans about how someone left a single spoon of drinking chocolate in the tin at his veteran's shelter. An elderly veteran informs him that "one spoon of chocolate can change a glass of milk." Of course, he's not really talking about drinking chocolate. The metaphor works on two levels: highlighting how one man can make a difference, and also noting how racists react when someone of darker skin joins their fair community. RZA combines both in a film that doesn't pull its punches. This isn't the usual white liberal take on race in America but rather a cathartic fantasy of violent revolt and revenge of the sort that were popular in the less politically sensitive '70s. There's no sugar-coating the racist villains here, with the N-word dropped what might be a record number of times by its white characters. White liberals might be just as offended by One Spoon of Chocolate as their right wing cousins, and it's telling that RZA avoided the usual copout of setting his film in the deep South but rather opted for the MidWest. By the time the obligatory training montage drops we're fully stoked to watch Unique send these people to Hell.
RZA does a fine job of building tension in his film's first half. He's so committed to evoking the grindhouse era however that some of his b-movie nods jar with the overall tone of the film. There are comic moments - such as an almost Lynchian sequence involving a bail bondsman and his horny secretary - that are clearly meant to evoke the cartoonish nature of '70s exploitation, but which take us out of what is otherwise a tense thriller (the appearance of Red apple cigarettes, indicating RZA's film takes place in the Tarantino-verse, another Brechtian barrier). Grindhouse thrillers were known for their brevity, rarely passing 90 minutes, but at close to two hours One Spoon of Chocolate could use some tightening of its saggy middle act. Some of its elements are hard to swallow, like how the town's African-American mortician is able to overlook so many young black male cadavers with their organs missing, or how Unique consults a survival manual gifted to him by a travelling salesman - surely there's nothing in the book he wouldn't have learned in the military?
When the climactic bloodshed arrives however it's a cathartic release after so much pent-up tension. In what is surely a nod to the classic revenge thriller Rolling Thunder, the climax takes place in a brothel that serves as the hideout for the racist gang. But RZA is canny enough to hold back from anything close to a fairy tale ending. A few racists might have been hacked to pieces but we're left in little doubt that things are unlikely to change for the better in Karensville or indeed America, anytime soon.
