Cherry review round-up: Tom Holland, Russo Brothers’ film 'does not offer anything new'

The first production by Anthony and Joe Russo after their Marvel Cinematic Universe adventures, Cherry, is based upon a semi-autobiographical novel of the same name and stars friendly neighbourhood Spiderman aka Tom Holland in the lead. While the movie has all elements for success — a hit story, talented actors, renowned Russ Brothers at the helm and a major production house backing it — the project still fails to reach the expected height, as per the reviews coming in. As Matt Fowler writes for IGN, the struggles of an army veteran who ends up becoming addicted to opium and then goes on to rob banks, is just something we have seen “play out in other movies about maladjustment, anxiety, and drug use” in the past. “Cherry doesn’t offer anything new nor does it tighten its runtime for the sake of brevity.” The review mentions how the film being compartmentalised into chapters like in a book helps viewers get “the story into more digestible pieces”, but it “never fully prevents Cherry from falling into a repetitive rut of feelings and themes”. Based on Nico Walker’s bestseller that came out in 2018, the adaptation by Anthony and Joe Russo is perhaps their attempt at leaving the shadow of MCU movies and showing the world that they are adept at handling “dark-side-of-the-street” topics, writes Variety. But whereas the original material “was celebrated as a gritty generational rallying cry”, the directors “inflate it into a showreel”. The director duo fails to come out of their vision as “fantasists” and Cherry ends up having the “glossy inauthenticity of a bad Tony Scott movie”. The act of treating Walker’s novel as a graphic novel is also talked about IndieWire in their review. The post says that “Cherry sometimes feels like more of a live-action comic book than any of the Avengers movies ever did” and the casting of Holland as the protagonist does not help. Although Holland acts by giving his all methodically, Cherry has “no way of getting you to care about someone who hardly seems to care about himself”. The protagonist stays nameless and fails to affect the audience as “one American disaster to the next” keeps getting hurled on him. “At the end of the day, his only available recourse is to sit down on the side of the road and decide that he just doesn’t want to be in this movie anymore”. Cherry streams on Apple TV+.