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In “Cherry”, Tom Holland sports a buzzcut, dead eyes and a skeevy complexion. In a self-reflective look at the effusive heroines of the “Spider-Man” movies, he plays an Iraq War veteran turned opioid addict turned heroin addict turned bank robber, and he looks zoned and strung. like Eminem like a fallen Eagle Scout. He’s got a cold sweat, he cries real tears and speaks in a phlegmatic voice, he twists his face into a pale mask of pain, and at one point he rubs the top of his noggin and says, “I have this noise in my head …why can’t it stop? When his girlfriend, also a junkie, abandons him for a spell, he sits in his car and sticks a hypodermic needle into her thigh, over and over again, to make him feel Something.
Holland’s character is never named (he’s a real dude out of nowhere), and in theory that’s the kind of role you might imagine Sean Penn took on in the late ’80s or’ 90s. Penn, addicted to the edge, was always backing his mojo method – and that is, in a corporate way, “Cherry’s” mission. The film is a double dose of branded extension. For Holland, the motivation is obvious: He proves that he’s not just a kid in a spandex suit, a light “escape” star – he can do really heavy stuff too. But “Cherry” is also a showy advertisement for its directors, Anthony and Joe Russo, the superstar superheroes who created the films “Avengers” and “Captain America”. In “Cherry”, they prove their credibility on the dark side of the streets.
Except that it all plays like a giant synthetic pot! “Cherry” is based on a 2018 semi-autobiographical novel by Nico Walker, a decorated US Army veteran who served time in jail for bank robbery, and the book was celebrated as a generational rallying cry. The Russo Brothers, working in an extravagant trowel style, inflate it into a show tape. They try to think beyond Marvel and flaunt their chops in the real world, but what they demonstrate instead is that even with material like this, they still think like fantasies. “Cherry” has the brilliant inauthenticity of a bad Tony Scott movie. The Russos treat Walker’s novel as if it were a graphic novel – a grunge layered cake that’s all icy.
It starts off as a love story set in college, where Holland’s unnamed hero, a bespectacled, floppy-banged dweeb, meets Emily (Ciara Bravo), who plays hard to get, and then doesn’t. doesn’t, then starts over, saying that she goes to school in Montreal (but only because she’s afraid of the depth of their love). This leaves Holland so lost that he enlists in the military, allowing the Russos to stage a basic training sequence that looks like a kid-movie knockoff of “Full Metal Jacket.” (This is where the movie calls Holland a “cherry.”) Then it’s off to the Iraq War, where the Russos can at least leverage their action chops, featuring a battle with a bird’s-eye view camera and explosive bombast, although this footage, for all its guts, doesn’t feel more authentic than the Vietnam of “Forrest Gump”. In either case, it’s hard to shake off the feeling that filmmakers are reframe these wars to use their.
Back home (which, by the way, is Cleveland), Holland flies off into PTSD and Oxycontin addiction. He has nocturnal panics (“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 wearing an LL Bean jacket instead of dressing up (wonders if it’s PTSD or “Project Runway”). Yet despite the clichés of bad behavior, the fight doesn’t seem to have altered him internally.
The problem with “Cherry” is that the film comes across as a dreaded slice of life, but almost every moment feels based not on experience but on the experience of other films. The Russos Elevator flourishes with everything from “Natural Born Killers” to “Far From Heaven” to Wes Anderson, and they mix in slow motion and opera tracks, with magnified and stylized sounds, and images. highlighted with a kind of music from the 80s – “Meaning” cut-in video. Yet they never convince us of the organic truth of the story they tell. Holland’s nonstop storytelling (“I’m 23 and still don’t understand what people do. It’s like it’s all built on nothing and nothing holds it all together”) indicates how filmmakers don’t trust the material to take on 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 skills. It touches a range of dissolute looks and moods. Yet there is no real danger to him. (That’s the difference between a Marvel Good Boy and a Sean Penn Bad Boy.) “Cherry,” after hesitating, finds a semblance of overdone consistency in his second half, when it turns into a two-junkie drama. spiraling into the abyss. It’s like seeing “Sid and Nancy” as a middle class doomfest staged in “Top Gun” style. Holland’s character isn’t just a hopeless junkie, he’s a colossally stupid and self-destructive addict. When asked to protect a drug dealer’s portable safe, he and Emily end up blowing it up and stealing the small mountain of drugs inside. Why are they doing this? So the film can break out of their bonehead masochistic extravaganza.
And I didn’t even mention the bank robberies! Thieves tend to wear masks and have plans because there are these things called surveillance cameras, and also the police, who have a way of impinging on the success of the crime. But in “Cherry,” Holland walks through one Cleveland bank after another, without disguise, waving his gun, carrying on eerily friendly conversations with the cashiers (who are all women) as they hand over piles of bills. . And then… nothing. No police pursuit, no repercussions. We realize, of course, that this can’t last, but we also realize, with a grim feeling, that the Russos must now be thinking they’re making a Tarantino movie. No. Not even close. There is hardly a moment in “Cherry” that is believable, but the real crime of the film is that there is hardly a pleasant moment either. The only emotion the film conveys is being full of itself.
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