Movie Review: One Spoon of Chocolate

 

Michael's Movie Grade: C-

This thriller starts strong but unfortunately falters out as it goes along. 

In this film a young black man goes to live with his cousin in a small town in Idaho after getting out of jail. He wants just to live peacefully and leave his past behind him. Unfortunately, a group of white supremacists decide to make life a living hell for him. 

After an unnecessarily gratuitously violent opening, this movie does a very good job creating an emotional connection between you and the main character. From the second you meet him you are set up to have sympathy for him. He fought for his country; he cares deeply about what is right and wrong and he is not afraid to stand up for what he believes in. He has been in jail for fighting a man who was beating his wife in fact. Added to this is that Shameik Moore is very charming and charismatic in the role. With our emotional connection this becomes a fairly strong if familiar drama about systematic racism, the treatment of veterans and corruption in law enforcement.

 However sadly this can't last. The movie soon becomes bogged down in an orgy of sex, violence and clichés. As the movie goes along, the violence and sex simply become gratuitous. Many scenes are not simply violent but repulsively gory for the sake of being repulsively gory. This movie would have lost nothing if it just simply cut away and left some of these gory scenes to our imagination. As the storyline and the action get increasingly over the top, the extremely realistic violence feels more and more out of place. The sex is just unnecessary. Many women are reduced to sex objects in many scenes that simply feel here to make this already very adult movie feel edgy. I am not squeamish or a prude but much of the sex and violence in this movie simply serves no purpose but shock value. Worse than this the social commentary and the characters often take a back seat to this shock value as the film continues. About halfway through this film, if not before then, everyone knows exactly what direction the story is going. However, as the film takes its time to get to the inevitable conclusion, the audience becomes impatient for what they know will happen to happen.

 I will admit though that when we get to the big, expected climax, it is quite well done though. 

It is sad when a movie that starts out quite strong, turns into something not so great. Unfortunately, that is the case here.