Straw: Overrated or Underrated?

As a movie lover, there’s one thing I don’t do which is to watch a movie which has so much hype the moment it’s released. In the moment where everyone is hyping the movie, it just turns me off from even seeing it. Most at times I end up seeing the movie after all the noise has died down.

But this time around I guess I decided to try something different. So, this show was released on 6th June which was about two weeks ago and the first time I heard of it was in TikTok. Everyone was saying the movie would make you cry and all. Next, a friend asked me if I had seen it and her comment was she didn’t understand the reason why this movie was hyped.

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A week later, I had my colleagues at work talk about this movie again and one of them even sent me a link to watch it. I still didn’t budge. But this weekend , I finally made time to see it and today, I’d be sharing my thoughts on it with you.

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THE PLOT

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This movie is a story of a single black mom Janiyah, who works two jobs just for she and her daughter with health issues to survive on the daily basis. They weren’t living in the best of homes but they at least had a roof over their head.

Even as Janiyah works her ass off day and night, she still can’t manage to give her daughter a comfortable life and this even leads her to have her kid eat a different lunch from the other students because she couldn’t afford the fee of $40. Her daughter gets laughed at in school and so she made a promise to get her the money once she took her pay that day.

But everything takes a turn when she gets to work and has to rush to the school because something happened to her daughter. Her boss gives her just 30 minutes to get back which she couldn’t meet. She arrived after two hours and ended up getting fired by her boss without even receiving her cheque. She rushes home to find out that her landlady had thrown her stuff out cos she couldn’t pay her rent and this leads her to rush back to work to try to get her cheque from her boss.

Back at work, their shop gets attacked by robbers and she gets accused of setting up the robbery. Amidst all the chaos, she ends up shooting her boss, getting her cheque and heading to the bank next door to cash it out. In there, she forgets she has a gun because her mind was only on cashing her cheque to get her kids $40 for lunch to her. This whole situation lead to she holding people in the back hostage and ending up getting imprisoned for something she never imagined.

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MY THOUGHTS AND RATING

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I love Taraji P. Henson so much and I make sure to miss none of her movies. But in all honesty, I’d rathe this show a 5/10.

This low ratings stems from the fact that this movie didn’t really make sense to me in the sense that I didn’t get why people said this movie would make you cry. I didn’t shed a single tear.

I get that Tyler Perry probably wanted to shed more light on the toils of single mothers but the plot doesn’t really do the magic for me even though I enjoyed every bit of it. The visuals were a 10/10 for me and the characters used were just the right ones. Aside this, I don’t think this movie is really worth the hype. My take!

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