Taraji P. Henson Shines In Overblown Tyler Perry Film

Janiyah Watkinson (Taraji P. Henson), the protagonist of Tyler Perry’s latest feature Straw, is having one of the worst days of her life. The trouble starts when her daughter Aria (Gabrielle Jackson) tells Janiyah that she needs $40 to pay her school lunch debt, otherwise the administrators will publicly shame her again. Then Janiyah’s landlord threatens to evict her that day if she doesn’t come up with rent.

Things only get worse at work: Janiyah gets into a minor altercation with a customer trying to buy prohibited items with her WIC card, and her boss, Richard (Glynn Turman), a cantankerous old man, refuses to give her an advance on her paycheck. Later, when Janiyah confronts Richard about the money, the pair gets robbed by masked gunmen.

The harrowing situation turns violent when the thieves try to steal Janiyah’s backpack, which holds her daughter’s seizure medication. A panicked Janiyah fights the assailants off, steals their gun and shoots one of them dead. Then, in the blink of an eye, she kills her boss too. As if in a fugue state, Janiyah grabs her blood-splattered paycheck from the desk and heads to the bank across the street to cash it. But her actions at the grocery store set off a Georgia state-wide police investigation, and Janiyah’s trip to the bank quickly turns into an unnerving hostage situation. 

After a brief detour into historical dramas — A Jazzman’s Blues and The Six Triple Eight — Perry returns to the overwrought melodramas that made him famous. Fans of the filmmaker will recognize the mélange of caricatures and predictable plotting that propel Straw to its charged conclusion. The film bears striking resemblance to Abi Damaris Corbin’s riveting thriller Breaking, which premiered at Sundance a few years ago. In that film, John Boyega played a marine veteran who robs a bank for $892, which is the amount the Department of Veterans Affairs owes him. His character, like Janiyah, is forced into a desperate situation by a system that has failed him. Michael K. Williams, in one of his final roles, played a hostage negotiator who establishes a rapport with Boyega’s character based on similar backgrounds and a shared history. 

Williams’ counterpart in Straw is Teyana Taylor, who plays Detective Raymond, a Black woman on the force who understands Janiyah’s pain when she realizes that the single mother has just reached her breaking point. Unlike the other officers, who believe that Janiyah set up her boss because of unknown grievances, Raymond knows this is a woman who has faced one too many obstacles. Their conversations consist of vaguely empowering confessions about how the world treats poor and working-class Black women with a cruel indifference. Straw at many points feels like a gender-swapped Breaking: Instead of focusing on how the U.S. fails Black men in the army, Perry considers how society judges and mistreats Black single mothers trying to eke out a living, 

Straw isn’t the worst Perry film, but it suffers from the same problems that plague all of his projects. The narrative is chock full of heavy-handed metaphors, fussy plotting and strained drama. The best parts of the film can be attributed to Henson, whose performance imbues some of the most melodramatic beats with some genuine pathos. From the moment we meet her character, waking up to the thumping music of her upstairs neighbor, we sympathize with her. Even as she struggles to make rent and get her daughter, who suffers from seizures, ready for school, Janiyah still finds time to acknowledge Benny (Sinbad), an unhoused man who begs for change outside her apartment complex. Janiyah meets everyone — even those coldest to her — with kindness. 

But the single mother is also visibly fatigued. Shuttling from her daughter’s school to work, fielding calls from administrators and bill collectors, she can’t seem to catch a break. So when she enters that bank, wielding a stolen gun and asking to cash her check for $500, there’s a sadness to her desperation. Nicole, the branch manager played by Shepherd, sees that; although she’s afraid, still treats Janiyah with compassion.

Henson finds complexity within a character that, in Perry’s workaday screenplay, could have been flat and one-dimensional. When Janiyah tells the scared patrons at the bank that this is all a misunderstanding, we don’t see a malevolent figure but a woman on the verge of a breakdown. 

Straw moves from one plot point to the next in a perfunctory manner. There are some humorous moments, some eye-roll-inducing set pieces and a few scenes of genuine connection. It’s really the relationship between Henson, Taylor and Shepherd’s characters — three Black women trying to see each other in a world that renders them invisible — that makes Perry’s film easier to endure.