One Spoon of Chocolate Review: RZA’s grindhouse-inspired take on Get Out comes up a little short

Plot: Follows Unique, a veteran and ex-convict seeking a fresh start in a small town. After an altercation with a gang of locals, he starts to suspect they may have something to do with the disappearance of young men in the area – including his cousin.

Review: Since his directorial debut in 2012 with the martial arts drama The Man With The Iron Fists, Wu-Tang Clan member RZA has been involved in writing or directing a half-dozen movies across various genres. RZA’s latest project is One Spoon of Chocolate, another genre throwback that draws inspiration from both the gory grindhouse films of the 1970s as well as the satirical narrative of Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Following a Black protagonist as he goes up against a town full of racists is far from new material for feature films, but RZA imbues One Spoon of Chocolate with his love of obscure movies while including a killer soundtrack. Boasting Quentin Tarantino as a presenter and executive producer, One Spoon of Chocolate has sparks of imaginative action but fails to do much more than feel like a grindhouse relic that came and went from theaters without leaving much of an impression.

The film opens with a sequence showing a local star athlete hitchhiking before getting beaten up by a group of masked vigilantes. When he awakens, he is in a strange doctor’s office covered with racist imagery as a masked surgeon removes his internal organs. An interesting start that takes a solid hour before becoming relevant again, the focus then shifts to Randy “Unique” Joneson, played by Shameik Moore. Unique is a former Army soldier serving time in prison. As he is freed, Unique’s parole officer, Beem (Blair Underwood), offers to let him go see family in Ohio if he maintains his behavior. Unique takes the chance and returns to the not-so-subtly named Karensville, where he reunites with his cousin, Ramsee (RJ Cyler). Before long, the pair are playing basketball and are accosted by some local racists working for Jimmy (Harry Goodwins). After kicking their asses, Unique and Ramsee, along with Ramsee’s girlfriend Aretha (E’mryi Crutchfield) and her friend Darla (Paris Jackson), are targeted by the racists.

It takes another person getting their organs harvested before Unique decides to enact his revenge. Using a mysterious survivalist handbook given to him by a traveling salesman on the bus, Unique enhances his military training with instructions on forging homemade weapons and traps to go after Jimmy and his boys. Clocking in at almost two hours, it takes more than half of the film before Unique begins his revenge. This means the film is full of meandering scenes that take far too long, involving sex scenes with medical-grade lubricant, a car chase so dark you can barely tell what is going on, and lots of moments explaining the connections between the law enforcement in town with Jimmy and the racists. The plot element of organ harvesting feels tacked on for much of the movie and never really develops into anything more than a link between the opening scene and the movie’s conclusion.

The entirety of One Spoon of Chocolate feels like it was written as multiple projects, then cobbled together into a single film. So much of the story wants to be relevant and satirize the idea of white supremacy and racism, but instead is rooted in the cliches and tropes of the very things RZA is trying to criticize. The problems seem to stem from Shameik Moore in the lead. Moore, best known for his roles in Dope and as Miles Morales in the Spider-Verse films, does not have the stature or presence to lead a film like this. Unique is presented as someone like Rambo and should have come off more like Aaron Pierre in Jeremy Saulnier’s Rebel Ridge, which also follows a former soldier getting revenge against small-town racists. Moore does show some skills in the closing fight sequences, but the over-choreographed combat does not do any favors for his final speech, which is meant to feel triumphant but comes across as underwhelming.

While RZA has appeared as an actor, most recently in Nobody 2, and co-composed the score for this film, One Spoon of Chocolate is not good enough to warrant comparisons to Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Peele played with the conventions of the horror genre to give a new spin on a timely topic, but RZA is more intent on pulling together his favorite movie elements and forcing them together. That is not enough to make One Spoon of Chocolate into a feature film. Even the title, taken from a line of dialogue spoken by an old man in a shelter at the start of the movie, is meant to be a small piece of wisdom with no relevance to the plot or themes. The most egregious decision that RZA made was to aim for an ambiguous ending that instead just feels like he forgot to add a satisfying conclusion to the movie. By the time the credits roll, you are going to feel like there is one more scene that should pop up, but it never does.

The ambition that RZA had in making One Spoon of Chocolate is commendable, and I do not begrudge his love of movies and the specific genres that inspired this movie, but as a writer and filmmaker, he just does not have the caliber of talent needed to pull it off. There are glimpses of what One Spoon of Chocolate could have been, especially in the final fight sequences that are pretty fun with some original moments that you likely have not seen in another film before, but it is just not enough to warrant the excessive running time of this movie. I would suggest that RZA stick to coming up with the ideas, then partner with a co-writer and maybe even a co-director to hone his projects into something a little more coherent while maintaining the unique ideas he wants to bring to the screen. Definitely stick with seeing this when it hits streaming rather than shelling out for a theater ticket.

One Spoon of Chocolate opens in theaters on May 1.