In “Cherry”, Tom Holland sports a haircut, dead eyes and a dark complexion. In a “look at me-tough-tough-guy” reversal of the effusive heroism of the “Spider-Man” films, he plays an Iraq War veteran who became addicted to opioids who became addicted to heroin turned bank robber , and he looks confused and tense. out, like Eminem like a fallen Boy Scout. He catches cold sweats, cries real tears and speaks in a phlegmatic voice, contorts his face in a pale mask of pain and, at one point, rubs the top of his head and says: “I have this noise in my head …why can’t you stop? “ When his girlfriend, who is also a drug addict, abandons him for a while, he sits in his car and repeatedly sticks a hypodermic needle in his thigh so that he feels something.
Holland’s character never gets a name (he’s a real guy out of nowhere) and, in theory, it’s the kind of role you could imagine Sean Penn taking on in the late 80s or 90s. Penn, an edge junkie, was always reinforcing his mojo do Método – and this, in an exaggerated corporate way, is the mission of “Cherry”. The film is a double dose of brand extension. For Holland, the motivation is obvious: he is proving that he is not just a child in a spandex suit, a light “escapist” star – he can also do really heavy things. But “Cherry” is also a flashy advertisement for its directors, Anthony and Joe Russo, the autistic superheroes from the “Avengers” and “Captain America” films. In “Cherry”, they are proving their credibility on the dark side of the street.
Except everything works like a giant synthetic crock! “Cherry” is based on a 2018 semi-autobiographical novel by Nico Walker, a decorated US Army veteran who served time in prison for bank robbery, and the book was celebrated as a courageous rallying cry for generations. The Russo brothers, working in a style of shattered extravagance, inflate him in a showreel. They are trying to think beyond Marvel and show off their real-world skills, but what they demonstrate is that even with basic material like this, they still think like fantasists. “Cherry” has the brilliant inauthenticity of a bad Tony Scott film. Russians treat Walker’s novel as if it were a comic book – a full-coverage grunge cake.
It begins as a love story set in college, where the anonymous hero from Holland, an idiot with glasses and soft bangs, meets Emily (Ciara Bravo), who plays hard to get, so he doesn’t and does it again, saying that she is going to school in Montreal (but only because she’s afraid of how deep their love is). This leaves Holland so lost that he joins the Army, which allows the Russians to stage a basic training sequence that is like an imitation of “Full Metal Jacket”. (This is where the film calls the Netherlands “cherry”.) Next is the Iraq War, where the Russians can at least resort to their action resources, staging the battle with a drag camera and explosive grandiloquence, although this The sequence, for all its spilled courage, seems no more authentic than Vietnam’s “Forrest Gump”. In each case, it’s hard to shake off the feeling that filmmakers are recreating these wars to to use they.
Back home (which, by the way, is Cleveland), Holland becomes addicted to PTSD and Oxycontin. He has a night panic (“I didn’t sleep. And when I did, I dreamed of violence”), and at one point he takes Emily to the theater and yells at someone for wearing an LL Bean jacket instead of dressing (making you wonder) whether this is PTSD or “Project Runway”). However, despite the clichés of bad behavior, the fight does not seem to have changed it internally.
The problem with “Cherry” is that the film presents itself as a dreadful piece of life, but almost every moment seems not based on experience, but on the experience of other films. The Russos elevator flourishes from everything, from “Natural Born Killers” to “Far From Heaven” to Wes Anderson, and they mix in slow motion and parts of opera, with enlarged and stylized sounds and images highlighted with a kind of 80’s music – “importance” of the cut video. However, they never convince us of the organic truth of the story they tell. Holland’s uninterrupted narration (“I am 23 years old and still don’t understand what people do. It is as if all this is built on nothing and nothing is holding it all”) indicates how the filmmakers do not trust the material to have a life of its own. Instead, each scene says, “See how we’re illustrating this!”
Tom Holland is not a bad actor and in “Cherry” he proves his skill set. It touches a variety of dissolute looks and moods. However, there is no real danger to him. (This is the difference between a good boy from Marvel and a bad boy from Sean Penn.) “Cherry”, after hesitating, finds an appearance of exaggerated coherence in its second half, when it turns into a drama of two drug addicts spiraling into the abyss. It is like seeing “Sid and Nancy” as a festival of the destruction of the middle class staged in the style of “Top Gun”. Holland’s character is not just a hopeless addict, he is a colossally stupid and self-destructive addict. Asked to protect a drug dealer ‘s portable safe, he and Emily end up exploding and stealing the small mountain of drugs inside. Why do they do that? So the film can start with its stupid masochistic extravagance.
And I didn’t even talk about bank robberies! Thieves usually wear masks, and they have plans, because there are these things called surveillance cameras, and also policemen, who have a way of meddling in the success of the crime. But in “Cherry,” Holland just wanders off one Cleveland bank after another, undisguised, waving his gun, having strangely friendly conversations with the cashiers (who are all women) as they hand over stacks of bills. And then … nothing. No police chase, no repercussions. We realized, of course, that it cannot last, but we also realized, with a sinking feeling, that the Russians must now think that they are making a Tarantino film. No. Not even close. There is hardly a moment in “Cherry” that is credible, but the real crime of the film is that there is hardly a moment that is pleasant either. The only emotion that the film conveys is being full of yourself.