Cherry movie review: Tom Holland spirals into addiction and crime in Russo brothers’ tortuous slog

Cherry begins as a college romance between angsty teens, like in a YA novel. Of course, its portrayal of disenfranchised youth, chewed up and spit out by the system, is more Ham on Rye than Thirteen Reasons Why. But just as you come to terms with being pulled into the whims and woes of a whirlwind romance, you’re pushed into the brutality of basic training at an army boot camp. Prepare yourselves for a Full Metal Jacket-lite montage starring a screaming, dick-kicking drill sergeant, who isn’t R Lee Ermey. Then, it’s off to war in Iraq, which evokes the blood, guts and slurs of The Hurt Locker. If all that wasn’t harrowing enough, the cyclical horrors of PTSD and drug addiction add to the viewer’s torment. Lots of messy stick-em-ups are thrown in for good measure. All in all, Cherry makes for one nauseous fever dream. Occasionally soundtracked to the arias of Puccini and Verdi, but still a nauseous fever dream. What’s most frustrating about the Russo brothers’ new movie is these disparate sections, virtually genres in themselves, obstinately refuse to work together. In co-opting far better films as thematic shorthand, they forget to establish an identity of its own. Nico Walker, who wrote the book the movie is adapted from, based Cherry on his own life, hoping to spotlight the opioid and PTSD crises that swept America following the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a similar vein to Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Rye, Cherry can be viewed as a Künstlerroman, a coming-of-age story that traces the evolution of Walker into an author. [caption id=“attachment_9401271” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Tom Holland in Cherry.[/caption] The title is Army slang for a new recruit who is a virgin in terms of combat experience, but also alludes to the protagonist’s lack of life experience. Tom Holland plays the nameless and directionless character who drops out of college, enlists in the Army, returns home with the demons of PTSD, develops a heroin dependency, and resorts to robbing banks to finance it. Ciara Bravo is Emily, his wife who follows him down the rabbit hole of addiction. Holland uses all of his physicality to evoke the inner conflict of Cherry’s shifting moral compass in his descent into drugs and crime. Pass marks for trying to expand dramatic range, but Holland is disastrously miscast here. Watch out for his comical moustache at the end. Chalk up Bravo in the win column though. Her turn as Emily is a lot more assured, even if the film never really probes the cause of her visible but undetermined emotional damage. [caption id=“attachment_9401281” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Ciara Bravo plays Emily[/caption] Cherry and Emily’s relationship has always been one of mad impulses and toxic co-dependency. Once Cherry meets her, it doesn’t take long for him to tell her he loves her. Emily, however, can only offer him gratitude in return before she announces, out of nowhere, that she’s transferring to a school in Montreal. In a contest of whims, he reacts by joining the Army. But realising she’s made a mistake, she confesses her love for him. Only, it’s too late as boot camp begins in a few days. So, they decide to get married before he gets shipped off. All these happen in Chapter 1. It’s a series of poor decisions as ill-conceived as some of Cherry’s prose. Exhibit 1: When Cherry asks Emily why she’s sweet to him, she replies: “I have a thing for weak guys.” Exhibit 2: Cherry becomes distraught with envy when she brings along a friend from Ghana. “I gave Benji a real man handshake, like I was a real man, so he was forced to take his hand off her back,” he says in voice-over. “I told her how I knew she didn’t mean anything by bringing Benji around, and that she was just a sweetheart who believed in diversity and developing countries.” Also, sample some of Cherry’s thoughts on trees: “I don’t understand them but I like them…It would have to be a pretty fucked up tree for me not to like it.” Holland’s character suffers from symptoms of discontent which can only be described as a Holden Caulfield hangover. [caption id=“attachment_9401251” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] A still from Cherry.[/caption] Besides lousy prose, Cherry has a problem of over-explaining. The Russos insist on informing the audience of chapter breaks with bold intertitles: “Prologue”, “Part One: When Life Was Just Beginning, I Saw You,” “Part Two: Basic,” “Part Three: Cherry,” “Part Four: Home,” “Part Five: Dope Life,” and “Epilogue.” Holland also hand-holds us through the story with fourth-wall breaks and inner monologues. “We should get married,” Cherry tells Emily before it cuts to their courthouse marriage, and the voiceover takes over: “So we went down to the courthouse and got married.” Before punching the bathroom mirror in frustration, he informs us, “I punched the bathroom mirror.” The Russos sure rip open the rule book on “Show, don’t tell." The visuals pop in some of the scenes, which play out like tacky music videos put through Instagram colour filters. The emphasis is more on freeze frames, changing aspect ratios and other affectations than the narrative that carries them along. Joe Russo had defended their hyperstylised aesthetic in a Vanity Fair interview : “The movie’s broken up into six chapters that reflect those different periods, and each one has a different tone. It’s shot with different lenses, different production design. One’s got magical realism. Another chapter is absurdism. Another is horror…There’s a bit of gonzo in it. It’s raw in its tone. He’s a character in existential crisis.” But the movie is stuck in an existential crisis of its own. It wildly veers from genre to genre to ultimately a shit sundae of nothing. The bow-tied resolution, if anything, is really just a cherry on top of that shit sundae. Rating: 1 (out of 5) Cherry will premiere globally on Apple TV+ on 12 March.