'Cherry' Review
R: Graphic drug abuse, disturbing and violent images, pervasive language, and sexual content
Runtime: 2 Hrs and 20 Minutes
Production Companies: AGBO, Hideaway Entertainment
Distributor: Apple TV+
Director: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo
Writers: Angela Russo-Otstot, Jessica Goldberg
Cast: Tom Holland, Ciara Bravo, Jack Reynor, Michael Rispoli, Jeff Wahlberg, Forrest Goodluck, Michael Gandolfini, Kyle Harvey, Pooch Hall, Damon Wayans Jr., Thomas Lennon, Kelli Berglund, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Fionn O'Shea
Release Date: February 26, 2021 | March 12, 2021
Theatrical and Apple TV+
"Cherry" follows the wild journey of a disenfranchised young man from Ohio who meets the love of his life, only to risk losing her through a series of bad decisions and challenging life circumstances. Inspired by the best-selling novel of the same name, "Cherry" features Tom Holland in the title role as an unhinged character who drifts from dropping out of college to serving in Iraq as an Army medic and is only anchored by his one true love, Emily (Ciara Bravo). When Cherry returns home a war hero, he battles the demons of undiagnosed PTSD and spirals into drug addiction, surrounding himself with a menagerie of depraved misfits. Draining his finances, Cherry turns to bank robbing to fund his addiction, shattering his relationship with Emily along the way.
Hollywood has been pushing the ever so charming and likable Tom Holland into darker roles lately, and we didn’t even get to a symbiote saga yet. As much as I just wanna pinch his cheeks no matter what edgy material he’s given, he’s exceptionally good in the titular role of Cherry. Given that this story spans throughout the course of the Bush administration as we follow Cherry from his early college days to the latter half of his 20s, Holland does the most with the material he’s given. As an audience member, you are thrown into Cherry’s mind throughout, with Holland giving excessive voiceover narrations, breaking the fourth wall, and delivering his lines in tune with the mood of the film. While the issues he must suffer are some of the darkest and heaviest that a person could’ve ever experienced during the early ‘00s — from war to PTSD to drug addiction — I give Holland an E for effort for not giving an over-the-top performance. There comes a point where he embodies a triggered psychotic character and it’s genuinely compelling to watch… even though that accent slips every now and then. What keeps Holland’s performance so grounded despite the subject matter is Ciara Bravo’s character, Emily.
Bravo is the perfect opposite to Holland as a fellow baby-faced person who makes the most out of the heavy material she’s given. It’s nice to see Bravo stretch her acting chops in a feature with a larger role than usual. The chemistry she has with Holland is the most powerful, captivating component of the film, though their spirals are as exhausting as they are engaging. Both actors were clearly committed to their roles and they function well together on screen.
My kryptonite during a film is watching characters inject themselves with needles on screen. The depiction of drug abuse just makes my heart sink, but needless to say, it makes the film so effective. The makeup department truly brought their A-game, selling you on the horrifying long-term effects that drug addiction has on a person. As time progresses, the couple falls deeper into their shared love of drugs. Their bodies become paler and there are more scars, cuts, and scabs on their bodies. During the latter chapters of the film, Cherry and Emily look like absolute shit and I have to commend the makeup artists for going the extra mile to make these two adorable people look so damaged.
For some reason, Cherry is being marketed as a film that discusses addiction and explores the opioid epidemic in America during the early 2000s. Cherry is, in actuality, a surface-level story that depicts an average young white man’s descent into addiction, throwing himself into all the relevant topics during the Bush administration, told in an overbearing, in-your-face manner.
Directors Joe and Anthony Russo have mostly made comedy and Marvel projects, so you’d expect their take on a mature crime drama to be somewhat interesting, for it gives them a chance to explore a visual style of their own. But holy shit, the style they go with is both muddled and egregiously distracting. Seriously, the film’s visual style is like when industry-known directors who exclusively make blockbuster productions try to scale back for an arthouse production. We’ve seen blockbuster filmmakers scale back and make decent films on a lower budget before, especially ones who can establish their own style like Michael Bay with Pain & Gain or Tim Burton with Big Eyes. However, the Russo Brothers don’t have their own visual style and they often rip off multiple filmmakers, including the ones I just mentioned.
The film has no idea what it wants to do visually, for it’s constantly throwing darts at the wall trying to see what sticks. Unfortunately, it ends up lacking an identity of its own. Since the film is broken up into multiple chapters, each one comes with its own box of gimmicks that are both flashy and overbearing. For starters, each chapter features its own aspect ratio, its own set of tinted color palettes (no matter which color it is, the brightness is automatically set so damn high because it obviously needs to contrast with the dark content), its own designated tone it doesn’t fully commit to, and whatever relevant topic it must discuss regarding the designated year during the Bush administration. For a film that’s over two hours long, it’s so damn exhausting that it borders on being annoying…. like jingling keys in a baby’s face type of annoying.
Cherry would’ve benefitted from committing to the type of world it wants to set itself in. As aforementioned, the film is set through the perspective of Cherry as he navigates through these basic early-2000s white boy problems. While the graphic depictions of the content, such as war, death, PTSD, and addiction are brutally realistic, you get minor –– and I mean very minimal –– original details of the world that Cherry resides in. It’s everything from the dismissive names of side characters, such as Sgt. Whomever, Dr. Whomever, and, my personal favorite, Pills & Coke (played by a hella charismatic Jack Reynor donning ‘80s getup) to the exterior set designs of local banks that are given names like “Shitty Bank”. While it’s admittingly immature, it’s something that should’ve given the film agency to flesh out the world of the titular character. Combined with the realism of the disturbing imagery, it comes across as a muddled mess that does little with its substance while doing way too much from a visual standpoint. If a Zemeckis film from the ‘90s walked into a Hot Topic, you’d get something like Cherry.
The story itself is rather incoherent and never knows whether or not to take itself seriously. Therefore, the narrative beats can be unintentionally bad for various reasons. Cherry and Emily are the absolute worst partners. Their incompatibility levels are so high that it retroactively shows them being perfect for each other by the end. The setup involves a good ol’ case of gaslighting that leads to the dumbest impulse decisions I’ve ever seen done by a character in a movie, followed by the dumbest fakeouts ever. If you’re not laughing at the story beats, you’re laughing at the stylistic choices that complement the dialogue. When you’re not laughing, you’re either cringing at the content (ex: a shot from Tom Holland’s asshole) or feeling exhausted by the inconsistent and unnecessarily extensive bouts of dialogue that take up so much of the film’s runtime. Holy fuck, this movie needlessly rants for so long, often about nothing, while saying nothing. Despite its intentions to help you understand Cherry’s psyche, he has such a dull, limited, and immature view of the world. The more time you spend with him, hearing his weightless dialogue, the more you just want him to shut up.
While I do think Holland and Bravo did an amazing job with their given roles, I would be lying if I didn’t admit that they were miscast. Hollywood, stop trying to push Tom Holland into gritty roles. He can’t sell it no matter how hard you make him try. It’s like Monsters University where Mike Wazowski wanted to be a scarer and everyone said he couldn’t do it because he just isn’t scary and that’s the cold hard fact. That’s how I feel about Tom Holland doing gritty roles because he still has such major baby energy. You could cast him in literally anything else with a lighter atmosphere, but not for a film that has the same #edgelord energy as that Shadow the Hedgehog video game from 2005. I would argue the same for Bravo, but we’ve seen her deal with dark material like this in Wayne. While her character is a teenager in that series, she’s a full-grown woman, but I still can’t get past that baby face. Holland and Bravo are both youthful, baby-faced beauties and you just wanna pinch their cheeks despite all the mature content they’re working with. Bravo could navigate more roles similar to Wayne in tone, but not Holland. Stop trying to make dark Tom Holland happen. It’s not gonna happen.
