Once you pop you just can’t stop. Or so goes the philosophy of the Joe and Anthony Russo when it comes to telling the story of a college-drop-out turned bank-robbing, dope-addicted war vet in Cherry. The directorial pair who rose to the highest of box office heights helming a handful of Marvel’s most critical and commercial smashes (including the last two Avengers mega-hits) prove uneasy with actual drama. Their telling of Nico Walker’s semi-autobiographical best-seller of the same name – adapted in part by screenwriters Angela Russo-Otstot and Jessica Goldberg, is meandering and unjustifiable long-winded.
Translated to screen with occasionally overzealous visual choices that call HBO’s teen drug drama Euphoria to mind, Cherry is the saga of a lost soul’s (Spider-Mar’s Tom Holland, as good as he’s yet been onscreen) downward spiral through PTSD, drugs, and crime. The problem is that as Cherry cycles through the various causes and effect’s of its antihero’s descent, it fails to really add anything meaningful to any individual part of the greater picture.
The Russos have openly called their film a referendum on the opioid crisis in the United States but there’s little novelty or thought-provoking about this tale, particularly as it’s pertains to the relationship between war veterans, addiction and crime. Cherry clumsily draws the connection between the Holland’s mental torment and PTSD and his turn to opioids, and soon after heroin, without offering any transcending thesis beyond: vets are fucked.
Simply, Cherry is a mediocre hodgepodge of various genre cliches. It’s an okay stick-em-up, a decent junkie drama, a mediocre war movie, and an uninspiring rom-com all in one! Cherry wants to be Requiem for a Dream and Jarhead and Bonnie and Clyde all at once but manages only to be a haphazard imitation of all. At nearly two and a half hours, editorial paring is widely underused, with little justification for the sprawling and at times non-sequitur nature of this adaptation.
Take for instance a scene where Cherry is asked to look after a drunk at a bar, drives the man home, and never hears from him again. These little asides might add context and richness in the novel but precisely so because they’re given more time to breath. Here, Cherry seems to rush through so much of the minutia of the novel which inspired it that it just feels like checking boxes rather than farming out the most important and relevant elements as they pertain to the feature they’re trying to tell.
Ultimately, Cherry feels very much like what happens when you take a pair of directors who’ve spent years making highly-involved franchise blockbusters, with their overbearingly specific shot-lists and checklist mentality, and ask them to apply that to drama. In short, it just doesn’t work very well.
Though the supporting roster features an intriguing mix of veteran and emerging talent in the form of Jack Reynor, Michael Gandolfini, Damon Wayans Jr., Ciara Bravo, and Forrest Goodluck, the side characters are mostly underwritten caricatures who drift in and out of the frame without adding all that much to the equation.
Through it all, Holland is solid as the troubled lead, cycling through the emotional turbulence of a man who loses himself beyond the point of recognition. The Marvel star has tipped his toes into more dramatic territory before, most recently in the flawed southern Gothic The Devil All the Time, but he’s allowed leeway here that shows his potential, and his limitations. Holland clearly has charm going for him and displays drug-inspired vacuousness well here but struggles to rein the skills in, at times doing a bit too much, or not quite enough. It’s a fine performance but one that will surely be looked back at as a stepping stone, rather than a genuine coming out party.
CONCLUSION: At two and a half hours, ‘Cherry’ attempts to tackle war values, PTSD, drug addiction, teen romance, and crime but the decently-entertaining character study settles to skim the surface of the issues it sets out to challenge. Tom Holland is genuinely good but the Russo Bros need to sharpen their dramatic directorial skill if they want to step away from solely commercial projects.
C
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By: Matt Oakes
Started blogging about film in college when the university paper wouldn’t have him. Dislikes your consensus film Twitter favorites. Devotee of horror movies that make him die a little inside. Catches films at festivals when he can. Proud SFCS and OFCS member and Tomatometer-approved critic. Editor-in-chief of Silver Screen Riot.
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