One Spoon of Chocolate review: As a director, RZA channels Jordan Peeles social horror for an action film

You'd be forgiven for thinking One Spoon of Chocolate was made by someone who's never been near a camera. RZA may not be the first filmmaker to come to mind when thinking of martial arts cinema, but his lifelong obsession with the wuxia genre — seeds planted during the '90s heyday of his legendary rap group, Wu-Tang Clan — feels like it ought to trickle down in some fashion. Unfortunately, the result feels comically conceived, despite RZA having directed several features and TV episodes, including 2012's The Man with the Iron Fists, which he co-wrote with Eli Roth, and done a directing stint on Marvel’s Iron Fist (no relation).

The movie's scant hints of action feature racially motivated violence (and subsequent righteous reprisal) that arrive more in the form of mild bumps than heavy kicks and fists. It's also the umpteenth horror-adjacent project birthed in the long shadow of Jordan Peele's Get Out, a landmark film whose short life has already yielded too many imitators to count. As if the ass-kicking mode of moviemaking wasn't enough to mess up on its own, One Spoon of Chocolate also fails spectacularly as social drama, making for the least attractive two-for-one deal imaginable.  

What is One Spoon of Chocolate about?

The long-gestating project was first mentioned by RZA back in 2012, as a movie spanning the '60s and '70s, though it no longer has a period setting — or much that discernibly grounds it in any era — but its contemporary premise has some very direct inspirations. Like Peele's Get Out, the prologue of One Spoon of Chocolate features a young Black man cautiously passing through a mostly white town, before he's attacked by masked hoodlums armed with baseball bats. That this group of assailants is all white is something you're left to intuit — not through skillful diversion, but rather, through sloppy lighting, editing, and framing. The film has no qualms about letting its villains viciously toss out racial slurs, but their appearance here is confounding: They're adorned with T-shirts with sanitized, store-bought slogans meant to assail their targets with sentiments no more threatening than, "Why, I oughtta!"

Rather than preserving a sense of mystery, the film depicts the aforementioned Black youth being placed on a slab, then his organs being harvested by a sinister white doctor in an upscale workshop surrounded by depictions of American slavery. This is what the movie's protagonists are up against, though it takes painfully long for this black market (pun… intended?) to rear its head again.

Elsewhere, former U.S. soldier Unique (Shameik Moore) is trying to readjust to civilian life when he's shipped off to the home of his cousin Ramsey (RJ Cyler) in Karensville, Ohio, where the opening lynching took place. No, you didn't hallucinate that fictitious town name — one that might remind the most unfortunate viewers in the crowd of the poorly received 2021 racial horror farce Karen. One Spoon of Chocolate similarly grasps at the most superficial possible symbols of racial animus in modern America, invoking whiteness as online virality and comical vigilante mobs more than a pervading power structure. Even the movie's title, born from an exchange about how a sprinkling of cocoa powder can irrevocably alter a glass of milk, gestures toward a story in which Unique's presence might reverberate through Karensville's social fabric. However, the town has plenty of Black residents, so the metaphor falls flat.

Its racial tensions come to light in a moment that promises rock-solid drama: As Unique and Ramsey shoot hoops at the local community center, a group of epithet-slinging white kids comes charging through, demanding the cousins stick to their side of town. Ramsey, having grown up in Karensville, knows the dangers posed by these self-appointed vigilantes, though Unique is less deferential to their demands. The tension between these approaches isn't something One Spoon of Chocolate explores, but this confrontation soon kicks off a brief action sequence, albeit one that sets the movie's disastrous tone. 

One Spoon of Chocolate is filled with limp action.

From the moment Unique shows off his martial arts skills against Karensville's proto-Klan, One Spoon of Chocolate is in trouble. Blocks, spinning kicks, and punches land with all the impact of a comedic slap-fight, despite RZA's best attempts to craft  coherent action. The saturated palette seems to hint at a heightened reality the movie never manages to equal; it's dead on arrival, yet it drags its own limp corpse through scene after scene.

On one hand, it's somewhat of a relief that Unique spends much of the movie sequestered in the sprawling garage of his white love interest (played by Paris Jackson) — a character with no real impact on the movie's plot or racial commentary — but this doesn't stop other action from occurring. The vigilante troupe, revealed to be the masked arm of the illicit organ trade from the movie's prologue, attacks several other Black characters, but their assaults are incredibly strange to watch. What ought to be hate crimes born of swinging baseball bats come off as gentle love taps in some of the strangest, most lethargic fight choreography ever put to film.

All the while, Unique can be glimpsed training according to a survivalist manual he comes across earlier in the film. However, these lengthy training montages not only separate him from the movie's plot for lengthy stretches — preventing him from interacting with the villains of his own story — but they set up promises that go completely unfulfilled. In these obfuscated hints, Unique appears to fashion brass knuckles from spare car parts while working on some kind of scrappy armor. However, the former is the only invention that really appears, and the latter doesn't really materialize. Instead, he goes on a limp rampage adorned in a black cloak.

When the movie reaches its inevitably tedious climax, it doesn't even have the decency to deliver on the promise of righteous bloodshed.

One Spoon of Chocolate uses social drama like a crutch.

Moore's character is seldom granted the kind of complexity that might make Unique a flashpoint of self-reflection. His place in the modern American zeitgeist is limited to the bullet-point facts of his experience as a Black soldier discarded by the system upon his discharge (with no meaningful attempts to even gesture at how the violence at home mirrors that abroad, and vice versa). This leaves Moore to lurch through scenes with dialogue that reaches for deeper meaning, but never finds it.

The movie's white supremacist vigilantes deliver verbal racism with the appropriate venom, but the payback for their words and actions carries no thematic weight (or really, weight of any kind). The ass-kicking that eventually comes their way isn't just lame as hell — the film's editing allows for far too much dead air, and almost no momentum — but it emanates from the collective cinematic image of the wuxia genre without ever crossing streams with the movie's desperate grasps at racial horror.

Despite hinting at the disposability of Black bodies in the white supremacist purview, One Spoon of Chocolate relegates its organ-harvesting saga to a background tapestry with little relevance. The resultant film is a confused hybrid of forms that demands spectacular, cathartic bone-crunching to even remotely work, but instead opts to end with a passive sermon about its own shallow themes, a climax so head-scratching that it renders the film an accidental self-parody, despite its sincere overtures. 

Despite its potential on paper, One Spoon of Chocolate is a bad time through and through. It stands on ceremony when it should go for the jugular, and both literally and metaphorically pulls every punch.

One Spoon of Chocolate was reviewed out of the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival.