In ‘Cherry’, Tom Holland plays a buzz, dead eyes and a crooked face. In a look-at-me-bad-self-reversal of the exuberant heroism of the “Spider-Man” movies, he plays an Iraqi war veteran who became an opioid addict and became a heroin-addicted bank robber, and he looks isolated and tense out, like Eminem as a fallen Eagle Scout. He gets the cold sweat, he cries real tears and speaks in a slimy voice, he twists his face in a pale mask of pain, and at one point he rubs the top of his noggin and says, ‘I have this sound in my head …why can it not stop? ” When his girlfriend, also an addict, abandons him for a spell, he sits in his car and inserts a needle into his thigh every time, so that he feels something.
Holland’s character is never mentioned (he’s a real nowhere guy), and in theory it’s the kind of role you’d imagine Sean Penn took on in the late ’80s or’ 90s. Penn, addicted to the fringe, has always been sharpening his Method mojo – and that is, in an exaggerated way, the mission of ‘Cherry’. The film is a double-dose extension of the brand. For Holland, the motivation is obvious: he proves he’s not just a kid in a spandex suit, a lightweight “escapist” star – he can do the right heavy stuff too. But “Cherry” is also a flashy advertisement for its directors, Anthony and Joe Russo, the superstar superhero authors of the movies “Avengers” and “Captain America”. In ‘Cherry’ they prove their dark side of the street.
Except that it all plays out like a giant synthetic mess! ‘Cherry’ is based on a 2018 semi-autobiographical novel by Nico Walker, a decorated U.S. military veteran who served time in prison for bank robbery, and the book was celebrated as an eager generation conspiracy cry. The Russo brothers work in a style of spit-out extravagance and blow it into a show roll. They try to think beyond Marvel and display their real chops, but what they demonstrate instead is that even with materials like these in the trenches, they still think like fantasies. ‘Cherry’ has the gleaming authenticity of a bad Tony Scott movie. The Russos treat Walker’s novel as if it were a graphic novel – a layer cake of grunge that is completely ripe.
It begins as a love story set in college, where Holland’s nameless hero meets a dweeb in glasses and slaps softly, Emily (Ciara Bravo), who’s hard to get, then does not, and then does do again and say she’s on her way to school in Montreal (but only because she’s afraid of how deep their love is). This makes Holland so lost that he joins the military, allowing the Russians to compile a basic training series, such as a film-brat knockoff of ‘Full Metal Jacket’. (This is where the film calls a ‘cherry’.) Then it goes to the war in Iraq, where the Russians can at least use their action chops, with great camera work and explosive magnification, although this sequence, all its consequences has. gut mess, does not feel more authentic than the Vietnam of “Forrest Gump” did. In both cases, it is difficult to disrupt the feeling that the filmmakers are reproducing these wars. use they.
Back home (which is Cleveland by the way), Holland becomes addicted to PTSD and oxycontin addiction. He has a night panic (“I did not sleep. And when I did, I dreamed of violence”), and at one point he takes Emily to the theater and yells at someone that she’s an LL bean jacket wear instead of dress (which makes you wonder if it’s PTSD or Project Runway). Despite the clichés for bad behavior, the fight does not seem to have changed him internally.
The problem with “Cherry” is that the film presents itself as a terrifying piece of life, but almost every moment feels like it is not based on experience, but on the experience of other films. The Russos elevator thrives on everything from “Natural Born Killers” to “Far From Heaven” to Wes Anderson, and they mix in slow motion and pieces of opera, with sounds that are magnified and stylized, and images with a kind of 80s annual music. video ‘importance’. Yet they never convince us of the organic truth of the story they are telling. Holland’s non-stop voice-over narrative (“I’m 23 years old and still do not understand what people do. It’s like it’s all built on nothing and nothing holds it all together”) indicates how the filmmakers do not trust that the material will get a life of its own. Instead, each scene says, “Look at the cool way we illustrate this!”
Tom Holland is not a bad actor, and in ‘Cherry’ he proves his skill. He touches a variety of decomposed appearance and moods. Yet there is no real danger to him. (This is the difference between a good son of Marvel and a bad son of Sean Penn.) ‘Cherry’ finds a semblance of excessive coherence in his second half, after floating around, when in a drama of two addicts change. spiraling into the abyss. It’s like seeing ‘Sid and Nancy’ as a middle class doom party presented in the style of ‘Top Gun’. Holland’s character is not only a hopeless addict, he is a colossal stupid and self-destructive addict. When he and Emily are asked to protect the portable safe of a drug dealer, it finally blows open and steals the small mountain of drugs inside. Why do they do it? So that the film can descend on their masochistic extravagance with the leg.
And I have not even talked about the bank robberies yet! Robbers tend to wear masks, and they have plans, because there are things called security cameras, and also police, that can intrude on the success of crime. But in ‘Cherry’, Holland just wanders from one Cleveland bank to the next, without disguise, waving his gun and having strange friendly conversations with the counters (who are all women) as they hand over stacks of bills. And then … nothing. No police raid, no consequences. We realize, of course, that it can not last, but we also realize with a sinking feeling that the Russians must now think that they are making a Tarantino film. Nope. Not even close. There’s hardly a moment in “Cherry” that is believable, but the film’s real crime is that there’s hardly a moment in it that’s pleasant either. The only emotion the film conveys is being full of itself.