Righteous fury comes to a racist town in RZA’s ‘One Spoon of Chocolate’

For more than 30 years, Robert Diggs — better known as the RZA — has been one of music’s singular forces. Whether guiding the sound and aesthetic of the Wu-Tang Clan or scoring films for Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino, RZA has concocted an aural blueprint all his own. As a director, though, his grip is far less firm, and despite his fourth feature being driven by a righteous fury, it’s rarely the potent, politically conscious action-thriller it aspires to be. Indebted to “First Blood” as much as it is to the beloved kung-fu flicks he grew up on, “One Spoon of Chocolate” looks hard at America’s racist past and present, but without the ingenuity or steely nerve of the Wu’s finest moments.

RZA reunites with Shameik Moore, who starred in his 2020 heist drama “Cut Throat City” and played Wu-Tang member Raekwon in the Hulu series “Wu-Tang: An American Saga.” In “One Spoon of Chocolate,” Moore is Unique, who’s recently been released from a New York prison after being convicted for assault and battery. (In Unique’s defense, he was protecting a neighbor from her abusive husband.)

A veteran who served three tours in Iraq, Unique longs to be with family to regain his emotional equilibrium, venturing to Karensville, Ohio, to connect with his cousin Ramsee (RJ Cyler). But this sleepy heartland town is secretly rotten to the core, run by a racist white sheriff, McLeoud (Michael J. Harney). Not long ago, Unique and Ramsee’s cousin Lonnie (Isaiah R. Hill) died there under mysterious circumstances, although the film’s opening flashback reveals to the viewer precisely what took place: He was viciously assaulted by a masked white gang so his organs could be harvested by a corrupt doctor. Now in the present, Unique finds himself in the crosshairs of those same rednecks, who don’t like his kind in Karensville.

Similar to “First Blood,” which introduced moviegoers to Sylvester Stallone’s tormented John Rambo, “One Spoon of Chocolate” drops a former soldier into an inhospitable land as he quickly realizes that his patriotism and military service afford him little respect. Unique’s dilemma is even more fraught than Rambo’s, of course, due to the racial tension. His main antagonist is Jimmy (Harry Goodwins), a white supremacist who is the sheriff’s son and the leader of the murderous gang. RZA’s villains aren’t simply evil: The actors portray them as backwoods cretins richly deserving of the pummeling that Unique will soon bestow upon them.

In the live-wire 2015 comedy-drama “Dope” and as the voice of Miles Morales in the “Spider-Verse” films, Moore proved himself a sly, likable star with flirty charm. Here, his mournful ex-convict is finally tasting freedom in a country that wants to keep him metaphorically shackled. (Blunt references to slavery abound in “One Spoon of Chocolate.”) But while Moore displays a sexy rapport with friendly Darla (Paris Jackson), RZA the screenwriter keeps letting down RZA the director by making his characters disappointingly cartoonish. As a result, unlike what his name would suggest, Unique is a fairly generic loner who dully seeks vengeance.

“One Spoon of Chocolate” is executive produced and presented by Tarantino, who shares with RZA a fondness for the disreputable corners of genre cinema. So it’s no surprise that RZA luxuriates in nudity, gore, sultry sex scenes and, eventually, brutal action sequences. But the expected seductive pull of the film’s sleazy pulp is noticeably lacking, mostly because the writer-director’s bloody set pieces aren’t especially imaginative. However, they are shot through with a deep anger as RZA unsubtly connects the dots between America’s bygone slave trade and our current rampant incarceration of young Black men — that is, when we’re not literally ripping their organs out of their bodies, per the plot. Unique is meant to embody that racial trauma, but Moore doesn’t possess the grit necessary to make the pain and sorrow resonate.

On landmark Wu-Tang Clan albums like 1993’s “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers),” RZA fashioned a barbed, mystic alternate reality in which bleak tales of crime and poverty coexisted with fantastical references to martial-arts movies and comic books. (Cheekily, RZA’s late Wu bandmate Ol’ Dirty Bastard shows up on the soundtrack via his 1995 hit “Brooklyn Zoo.”) Of RZA’s four films, “One Spoon of Chocolate” most closely matches that mixture of escapism and cultural commentary, sampling Blaxploitation and Hong Kong action to provide a snapshot of modern America, even though the film actually takes place in the 1990s. The moral decay of Karensville might as well be Charlottesville and the epithet-spewing McLeoud behaves too much like myriad red-state lawmen for comfort.

So if “One Spoon of Chocolate” ultimately fails as a grindhouse banger, you still might understand why RZA developed this project for more than a decade. His rage at this inequitable country has only grown more acute as America’s racial divides widen and codify. But like Unique, RZA doesn’t know how to fight his way out of the hell that surrounds him.

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