One Spoon of Chocolate (2026)
Directed by: RZA
Premise: A Black ex-con (Shameik Moore) is released from prison and relocates to a small town where a white supremacist gang and the local sheriff prey on Black people, killing them and selling their organs.
What Works: As a filmmaker, RZA has channeled exploitation cinema of the 1970s, namely kung-fu movies and blaxploitation pictures, as seen in The Man with the Iron Fists and Cut Throat City. One Spoon of Chocolate follows from those influences. Much like Quentin Tarantino did in Kill Bill and Django Unchained, RZA has created a tall tale that exists in an exploitation cinema reality. One Spoon of Chocolate is frequently outrageous with prurient, low brow thrills of sex and violence and a vulgar sense of humor. However, One Spoon of Chocolate has moments of beauty, especially a night chase through a junkyard, and some real moments between the characters. This film has committed performances by its central cast, especially Shameik Moore in the lead role, Paris Jackson as his love interest, and Harry Goodwins as the leader of the gang.
What Doesn’t: The exploitation films that One Spoon of Chocolate emulates had a sleekness and structure to their stories, a commitment to showmanship, and a sense of fun, all qualities that are lacking here. Once Spoon of Chocolate is overlong and poorly paced. The viewing experience is laborious. It’s obvious where all of this is going and the audience waits for the filmmakers to catch up. The hero spends a great deal of the movie hiding in a garage and planning his revenge. This flattens the middle of the picture. There’s not much sense of rising conflict and not enough happens. The action sequences are not done well. They lack the stunt work and kineticism that viewers have come to expect from recent genre pictures and the action itself is often incoherent. The problems of the storytelling and the action are intertwined. One Spoon of Chocolate is a revenge thriller but there’s no real end goal here. No one is being saved and the hero’s actions are not going to change anything. The filmmakers clearly want Once Spoon of Chocolate to be a political film. It’s certainly an angry movie. Revenge stories work by creating a just rage and One Spoon of Chocolate has rage to spare but the politics are so obvious and simplistic that the movie is shrill and off-putting without revealing anything new or interesting.
Bottom Line: One Spoon of Chocolate aspires to the blaxploitation cinema of the 1970s but it does not have any of the qualities that made those movies successful. It’s clumsy and unpleasant and its political point is not nearly as provocative as the filmmakers think it is.
Episode: #1098 (May 10, 2026)