Note: The writer of this review has looked Cherry on a digital screener from home. Before you decide to see it – or any other movie – in a movie theater, consider the health risks. Here is an interview on the matter with scientific experts.
Cherry is a bombastic epic about suffering: the empty, supersized IMAX version of an “important” drama. After 140 minutes it is about as long as one Avengers film, and just as subtle. That is not an arbitrary comparison or coincidence. The directors, Joe and Anthony Russo, are all set EndgameHow do you follow the greatest movie of all time? If you are these two, act like Tom Jane and turn to a gritty addiction drama to prove that you are serious performers. Yes, Cherry is the duo Clutter– a fake movie that comes to mind, even if the filmmakers did not have cut their teeth directing episodes of Arrested developmentincluding one with a call back to that jokeThe film describes two decades of fear and adversity in the life of a tortured young man and is as thirsty for prestige as its characters are for something they can pop, shoot or sniff. Still, it’s made with all the restraint and nuance you’d expect from – in the immortally narrated words of Ron Howard – a rigid, formulaic popcorn movie.
On blockbuster duty, the Russos are no slouch. Their superhero goggles have a sleek pinch, honed by years of improving the visual comedy of network sitcoms. But their approach is a blatant mismatch Cherry‘s grim source material The film is based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Nico Walker, an Army veteran who turned to drugs to work through his trauma and bank robbery to pay for the drugs. (He wrote the book behind bars.) The Russos mainly treat his slightly fictionalized story as an opportunity to flex some unused stylistic muscles – to try out all the tricks they couldn’t try while sticking with the Marvel – template: dolly shots, jump cuts, extreme angles, unsaturated drug trip sequences, and exaggerated aspect ratio changes. At one point, they make a rectal exam from the perspective of the rectum. It could be the defining image of a movie up its own ass so far.
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For a while, the two seem to be content with substandard Scorsese. (That filming began in October 2019, right around the time Marty made his controversial comments about Marvel movies, almost leads one to wonder if the studio’s most trusted hitmakers didn’t want to prove they could do what he does, easily.) Cherry begins with one of those “How did I get here” moments, when an outlaw (Tom Holland, also on Disney leave) turns to address the audience during a bank robbery. These fourth wall breaks are interspersed with continuous voiceover commentary as the film rewinds several years to the unnamed protagonist’s salad days as an Ohio college student, whispering sweet nothings to campus girlfriend Emily (Ciara Bravo), the wicked defined romantic center of his world. Those who wonder how Goodfellas could play if it did narrated by the bag-obsessed teen from American beauty now have their answer.
Cherry has the “and then this happened ”dramatic formlessness that often characterizes memoirs, but without the specificity of the tradeoff. The script, by Jessica Goldberg and the director’s sister, Angela Russo-Otstot, retains a novelist scope and unfolds across six chapters, plus a prologue and an epilogue. But it plays more like an edit of a Wikipedia summary, skipping entire paragraphs of incidents in the style of dorm room staples. Once the empty lover of Holland boy fights his broken blues by signing up, the film turns into a sleek music video Full metal jacket, allowing the Russos to make montage through basic training towards their own addition to the canon of lengthy, intricate combat sequences. (The weak military criticism has been reconciliation for their time in the trenches of a franchise with ties to recruiting effortsOnce back in Ohio, Walker’s on-screen surrogate plunges into a wannabe Trainspotting, who takes us through the highs and lows of the ‘dope life’, with Jack Reynor as an obnoxious dealer simply called Pills & Coke.
For Holland, the youngest star of the MCU, this is a blow to typecasting. He slips both the spandex and gee-whiz innocence of Peter Parker, he sweats and swears and jerks off and fires a gun and sticks a needle in his arm. Cherryis almost as bleak and unheroic, as last year’s change of pace for the actor, the Southern Gothic misery ensemble The Devil All The TimeBut he doesn’t have a real character to play here – the lack of a name suggests such a thinly sketched figure, a man who appears to be halfway even before heroin takes him down. (He’s a zombie on and off the wagon.) Bravo fares worse in a role that turns a different kind of ungrateful each chapter, as Emily transitions from idealized dream girl to incessantly loyal military woman to zoned devil who screeches when they go to score . Drawn from Walker’s pages or not, the dialogue does no one any good. “Actually, I was a sad, crazy bastard about the horrors I had seen,” Holland says bluntly. Reynor’s garbage bag puts it even less eloquently: “You’re a junkie bastard with PTSD!”
This is a movie that has nothing new to say about love, war, trauma, addiction, crime or America. It blows through these subjects in a flexible hyper-stylized manner, indifferently changing its true story in the form of other, better films. On the last piece, the delusions of grandeur have caught up with showboating, especially during a laughably long-lasting slow-motion climax and a denouement that just must have gone temporarily to ‘On The Nature Of Daylight’. You wonder if you’re working with a $ 300 million budget you rot brain or at least kills your ability to make something small or remote really ever again. Either way, you might think of tenure for some TV’s most post-modern comedies would at the very least give the Russo brothers a more pronounced self-awareness about the dividing line between seriousness and mere pretensions. Community couldn’t parody this movie better than itself.