Taraji P. Henson Shines In Overblown Tyler Perry Film

Janiyah Watkinson (Taraji P. Henson), the protagonist of Tyler Perry’s newest characteristic Straw, is having one of many worst days of her life. The difficulty begins when her daughter Aria (Gabrielle Jackson) tells Janiyah that she wants $40 to pay her college lunch debt, in any other case the directors will publicly disgrace her once more. Then Janiyah’s landlord threatens to evict her that day if she doesn’t provide you with hire.

Issues solely worsen at work: Janiyah will get right into a minor altercation with a buyer making an attempt to purchase prohibited gadgets along with her WIC card, and her boss, Richard (Glynn Turman), a cantankerous previous man, refuses to provide her an advance on her paycheck. Later, when Janiyah confronts Richard concerning the cash, the pair will get robbed by masked gunmen.

The harrowing state of affairs turns violent when the thieves attempt to steal Janiyah’s backpack, which holds her daughter’s seizure treatment. A panicked Janiyah fights the assailants off, steals their gun and shoots considered one of them useless. Then, within the blink of an eye fixed, she kills her boss too. As if in a fugue state, Janiyah grabs her blood-splattered paycheck from the desk and heads to the financial institution throughout the road to money it. However her actions on the grocery retailer set off a Georgia state-wide police investigation, and Janiyah’s journey to the financial institution shortly turns into an unnerving hostage state of affairs. 

After a short detour into historic dramas — A Jazzman’s Blues and The Six Triple Eight — Perry returns to the overwrought melodramas that made him well-known. Followers of the filmmaker will acknowledge the mélange of caricatures and predictable plotting that propel Straw to its charged conclusion. The movie bears hanging resemblance to Abi Damaris Corbin’s riveting thriller Breaking, which premiered at Sundance just a few years in the past. In that movie, John Boyega performed a marine veteran who robs a financial institution for $892, which is the quantity the Division of Veterans Affairs owes him. His character, like Janiyah, is pressured right into a determined state of affairs by a system that has failed him. Michael Ok. Williams, in considered one of his closing roles, performed a hostage negotiator who establishes a rapport with Boyega’s character primarily based on related backgrounds and a shared historical past. 

Williams’ counterpart in Straw is Teyana Taylor, who performs Detective Raymond, a Black lady on the drive who understands Janiyah’s ache when she realizes that the only mom has simply reached her breaking level. Not like the opposite officers, who imagine that Janiyah arrange her boss due to unknown grievances, Raymond is aware of it is a lady who has confronted one too many obstacles. Their conversations include vaguely empowering confessions about how the world treats poor and working-class Black ladies with a merciless indifference. Straw at many factors appears like a gender-swapped Breaking: As an alternative of specializing in how the U.S. fails Black males within the military, Perry considers how society judges and mistreats Black single moms making an attempt to eke out a dwelling, 

Straw isn’t the worst Perry movie, nevertheless it suffers from the identical issues that plague all of his initiatives. The narrative is chock stuffed with heavy-handed metaphors, fussy plotting and strained drama. The very best components of the movie may be attributed to Henson, whose efficiency imbues among the most melodramatic beats with some real pathos. From the second we meet her character, waking as much as the thumping music of her upstairs neighbor, we sympathize along with her. Whilst she struggles to make hire and get her daughter, who suffers from seizures, prepared for varsity, Janiyah nonetheless finds time to acknowledge Benny (Sinbad), an unhoused man who begs for change outdoors her house complicated. Janiyah meets everybody — even these coldest to her — with kindness. 

However the single mom can also be visibly fatigued. Shuttling from her daughter’s college to work, fielding calls from directors and invoice collectors, she will’t appear to catch a break. So when she enters that financial institution, wielding a stolen gun and asking to money her test for $500, there’s a unhappiness to her desperation. Nicole, the department supervisor performed by Shepherd, sees that; though she’s afraid, nonetheless treats Janiyah with compassion.

Henson finds complexity inside a personality that, in Perry’s workaday screenplay, may have been flat and one-dimensional. When Janiyah tells the scared patrons on the financial institution that that is all a misunderstanding, we don’t see a malevolent determine however a girl on the verge of a breakdown. 

Straw strikes from one plot level to the following in a perfunctory method. There are some humorous moments, some eye-roll-inducing set items and some scenes of real connection. It’s actually the connection between Henson, Taylor and Shepherd’s characters — three Black ladies making an attempt to see one another in a world that renders them invisible — that makes Perry’s movie simpler to endure.