The Last Straw – STREAMING MOVIE NIGHT

2025 Netflix

Rated: R

Length: 1 hr 45min

Drama ~ Thriller

Starring: Taraji P. Henson, Sherri Shepherd, Teyana Taylor, Sinbad, Rockmond Dunbar, Ashley Versher, Mike Merrill, and Glynn Turman.

This Is Her Last…….

WOW! What an incredibly bad day Janiyah is having………..and then it gets worse……..and then you find out it is even worse than you can imagine. We all have them, incredibly bad days where it seems like no matter how hard you try, it just goes downhill. It gets worse and worse until you just want the day to end. Janiyah wakes up in a crappy apartment with no ac and loud music from the neighbors. No mind, she gets her daughter ready for school and leaves the apartment. Where her landlord promptly tells her if she doesn’t get the rent money, she is going to have to evict her. And it rapidly gets worse from there, to the point that any human being would use their last straw and snap.

I love this movie, it says so much on so many levels. It is dramatic and intense and yet it is heart warming and sad all at the same time. Tyler Perry outdid himself on this one but Taraji……this woman deserves an OSCAR for this performance! If she isn’t even nominated or doesn’t win an OSCAR….you know things are fixed. I’m not kidding, she deserves that kind of recognition for her performance in this. Tyler Perry should have named it TARJI instead of STRAW. Let’s start a movement……

OSCAR FOR TARAJI!

Here’s what Tyler Perry said about Taraji’s performance:

(From Netflix Tudum)

Taraji is the heart and soul of this film — she carries all of the emotional weight of this woman having the most challenging moment of her life. Taraji takes the audience through every emotion her character is having and that’s why she’s such a brilliant actor. You can’t take your eyes off her when she’s on screen. Anytime I start to write, I see a person’s face, and Taraji was the person that I saw fully and clearly. From the first word that Janiyah spoke on the page, I thought, “This is Taraji. I hope she will do it.” So I sent it to her and she read it, and she was like, “I love it. I’m in. Let’s do it.”

Taraji and her character carry the entire movie. But the support of these characters is so important to turn the page in the story and understand that Janiyah didn’t want to get to this point — life and situations and circumstances happened. And it takes all of these pivotal women and their characters and their experiences to tell that story.

What Taraji thought about Janiyah and Straw:

Straw is about a woman who reaches her tipping point. It’s the day from hell. I don’t know if anyone out there has ever experienced a day where it’s like, “What else could happen?” Everything that can go wrong, goes wrong in this one day. It’s about how humans operate in that heightened state of panic and anxiety and pressure. When the pot is boiling and it finally explodes, what happens? What does that look like and how does it affect the people around you?

Janiyah is a woman who doesn’t really have a voice. She hasn’t been allowed to find it and she’s just trying to survive under the radar. I don’t even really think she wants to be seen by many people. She just wants to do what’s right for her daughter and live her life. There are so many people like that in the world. And, I think for Janiyah, the thing that is keeping her alive is her daughter, because that’s her sense of belonging. That’s the one thing that makes her feel like a person, because she brought life into this world and she takes it very seriously. She doesn’t have much, but all she has, she gives to her daughter. I know so many people who’ll be able to identify with her and that love you have for a child, whether you’re rich or poor.

As a single mother, I understood Janiyah’s struggles profoundly. She’s trying her best with very little, but what she lacks in opportunity, she has in abundance when it comes to the love she has for her child. She’s been given a difficult hand, but it’s how she deals with that really moved me. It’s so easy for people like her to be overlooked and disenfranchised by society. All the odds stacked against her and it’s something I’ve dealt with in my own life. I felt like I knew this woman personally.

You have to watch this one. That’s what I say. What a great movie. It is thought provoking and it has twists and turns you didn’t see coming. And Tyler should have named it TARAJI and she deserves an OSCAR!