Straw (2025)
Directed by: Tyler Perry
Premise: A single mother (Taraji P. Henson) reaches a breaking point and inadvertently incites a hostage crisis at a bank.
What Works: On a strictly emotional level, Straw succeeds in inciting righteous indignation. Taraji P. Henson’s character suffers through a series of indignities at work, at her child’s school, and finally at the bank. The filmmakers intend to put us on this woman’s side and everything in the movie is pitched to get us to sympathize with her. This is a polemical film. The story strings together poverty, inadequate schools, overzealous child protective services, exploitative employers, and corrupt law enforcement to create an unbearable burden. There’s also an explicit identity angle to the film. The characters who empathize the most with the protagonist are other Black women, namely the bank manager (Sherri Shepherd) and a police detective (Teyana Taylor); the film is not so subtly suggesting racial and gender solidarity. The extent to which Straw succeeds is largely due to the performance of Taraji P. Henson. She spends most of the movie in a state of extreme distress and Henson keeps up the energy throughout.
What Doesn’t: Straw mostly works in an immediate emotional way but the film is superficial and the story doesn’t hold up on examination. Early on, Henson’s character gets caught up in a robbery and under duress she deliberately kills an unarmed person. As a piece of rhetoric, Straw never recovers from that choice. The filmmakers intend to put us on the character’s side but the murder creates a rhetorical problem for the movie that the filmmakers seem to hope we won’t notice. The killing might work for the film if it had a more nuanced view of the world but everything about Straw is histrionic and simplistic. Virtually everyone in the film is either a bully piling onto Henson’s character or they are a gentle soul trying to help her. Straw comes across politically anachronistic. It plays like a feature that would have been produced at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. Coming years after that cultural moment its political messaging is passe at best. The moviemakers sabotage themselves in the ending. A big twist is revealed in the last few minutes and it’s incredibly stupid. The twist comes across as an attempt to shock the audience but all it does is create logical holes throughout the story.
Disc extras: Available on Netflix.
Bottom Line: Straw mostly succeeds in creating a visceral emotional impact but the story fails as some larger social statement. The filmmakers intend this to be Dog Day Afternoon but Straw is too simplistic and too dumb to be taken seriously.
Episode: #1057 (July 20, 2025)