Note: the author of this review watched Cherry on a digital screen From home. Before making the decision to see it – or any other film – in the cinema, consider the health risks involved. Here it is an interview on the subject with scientific experts.
Cherry it is a bombastic epic of suffering: the empty and gigantic IMAX version of an “important” drama. At 140 minutes, it’s almost as long as a Avengers film, and so subtle too. This is not a random comparison or coincidence. Its directors, Joe and Anthony Russo, are far from Endgame. How do you follow the greatest film of all time? If you are these two, you do it like Tom Jane and spin in an addiction drama to prove that you are a serious artist. Yea, Cherry is the duo Filth– a fake movie that can jump to mind, even if filmmakers did not have cut your teeth driving episodes of Development held, including one with a callback for that same joke. Counting two decades of anguish and misfortune in the life of a tortured young man, the film is as thirsty for prestige as its characters for something they can pop, shoot or smell. However, it was made with all the restraint and nuance you would expect from – in the words of Howard Howard’s immortally narrated – a rigidly formulated popcorn film.
On a blockbuster mission, the Russians are not sloppy. His superhero shows have a sharp sharpness, enhanced over the past years by piercing the visual comedy of network sitcoms. But his approach is a flagrant incompatibility for Cherryin dark source material. The film is based on the semiautobiographical novel by Nico Walker, an Army veteran who turned to drugs to deal with his trauma and robbed a bank to pay for the drugs. (He wrote the book behind bars.) The Russians primarily treat their slightly fictional narrative as an opportunity to flex some unused stylistic muscles – to try all the tricks they couldn’t while adhering to the Marvel model: doll shots, cuts jumping, extreme angles, desaturated drug trip sequences and exaggerated changes in aspect ratio. At one point, they film a rectal exam from the perspective of the rectum. It may be the defining image of such a meticulous film.
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For a while, the two seem content to make Scorsese below average. (That shoot started in October 2019, just around the time that Marty made his controversial comments about Marvel films, almost makes one wonder if the studio’s most trusted hitmakers didn’t set out to prove they could do what it does, easy.) Cherry it starts with one of those “How did I get here” moments, when an outlaw (Tom Holland, also on Disney leave) turns to address the public during a bank robbery. These fourth wall breaks will be exchanged with an off-line voice commentary as the film goes back several years to the difficult days of its unidentified protagonist when he was a college boy in Ohio, whispering sweet words to campus girlfriend Emily (Ciara Bravo ), the ill-defined romantic center of his world. Those wondering how Good companions could play if it was narrated by the teenager obsessed with scholarships American Beauty now you have your answer.
Cherry has the “and then it is it happened ”a dramatic absence of form that frequently characterizes memories, but without any specificity of exchange. Its script, by Jessica Goldberg and sister of the directors, Angela Russo-Otstot, preserves a romanesque scope, unfolding in six chapters, in addition to a prologue and an epilogue. But it looks more like an adaptation of a Wikipedia summary, flipping through entire paragraphs of dormitory-style incidents. Since Holland’s empty lover boy fights against the blues of the breakup enlisting, the film follows in a simplified music video Full Metal Jacket, allowing the Russians to ride through basic training en route to their own addition to the canon of long-range battle sequences. (It is the weak military criticism atonement for his time in the trenches of one franchise linked to recruitment efforts?) Back in Ohio, Walker’s on-screen substitute turns into an aspiring Trainspotting, indulging us in the ups and downs of “drug life”, with Jack Reynor as a hateful drug dealer referred to simply as Pills & Coke.
For Holland, the youngest star in the MCU, this is a blow to the choice of types. Apart from Peter Parker’s spandex and stupid innocence, he begins to sweat, swear, masturbate, shoot a gun and stick a needle in his arm. Cherryit’s almost as bleak and unheroic as the actor’s change of pace last year, Southern Gothic misery ensemble The devil all the time. But he doesn’t have a real character to play here – the lack of a name is appropriate for such a poorly sketched figure, a guy who seems kind of there before the heroine finishes him off. (He’s a zombie in and out of the car.) Bravo does worse in a role that becomes a different kind of ungrateful in every chapter, while Emily slips from the idealized dream girl to the incessantly loyal military wife and the zoned demon screaming when they are going to score the next one. Whether or not taken from Walker’s pages, dialogue does not favor anyone. “Basically, I was being a son of a bitch sad and crazy about the horrors I had seen,” Holland bluntly diagnosed himself. Reynor’s dirty bag puts it even less eloquently: “You are a son of a bitch addicted to PTSD!”
This is a film with nothing new to say about love, war, trauma, addiction, crime or America. He blows through these topics in a hyper-stylization curve, regardless of distorting his true story in the form of other better films. In its final stretch, the illusions of grandeur reached showboating, especially during a ridiculously prolonged slow-motion climax and an outcome that just had to be temporarily traced to “On The Nature Of Daylight”. That leaves you wondering if working with $ 300 million budget rot your brain or at least kills your ability to do anything small or remotely real again. Either way, you would think of stability in some of Most postmodern TV comedies would at least give the Russo brothers a more pronounced self-awareness about the line that separates seriousness from mere pretensions to it. Community he couldn’t parody this film better than himself.