'Cherry' review: Tom Holland has the goods for the role but film doesn't deliver
Tom Holland is such a terrific actor he can almost make you forgive the faults and punishing overlength (two hours and 20 minutes) of "Cherry," yet another addiction drama that doesn't know when to quit.
Stream this bombastic botch job on Apple TV+ starting March 12 and you'll watch a promising plot -- based on a strong, semi-autobiographical novel by Nico Walker, who wrote the book in jail -- collapse like a house of cards.
The result of the film is a shame since Holland has the goods to play the hell out of the title role of a young, PTSD-afflicted Army medic in Iraq, nicknamed Cherry like the other raw recruits, who becomes addicted to opiods and takes to robbing banks to pay for his junkie habit.
The role is a huge change of pace for Holland, the 24-year-old British actor best known for bringing fresh comic thinking to high-school student Peter Parker and his alter-ego Spider-Man in a series of boffo Marvel epics. "Cherry" reteams Holland with Anthony and Joseph Russo, the brothers who most recently directed him as Spider-Man in "Avengers: Endgame," currently the highest grossing movie of all time.
It's not hard to understand why Holland and the undeniably gifted Russo brothers would want to show they have more on their creative palettes than special-effects extravaganzas. Holland's virtuosity has been on display since his 2008 London stage debut in "Billy Elliot the Musical." And his 2012 feature film launch in the disaster movie "The Impossible" had critics doing handstands. Last year, Holland again won praise for the southern Gothic crime drama "The Devil All the Time." But you can tell "Cherry" is meant to send Holland spinning into the thespian stratosphere.
In better hands, it might have.
"Where do you want me to start?" asks Cherry in voiceover as a chapter heading (the film is loaded with them) flashes on screen: "When Life Was Beginning—I Saw You." The you is Emily, an Ohio coed sweetly played by Ciara Bravo ("A Teacher") who mesmerizes our boy with her smarts and flirty banter.
That is, until she breaks things off, prompting him to enlist in the Army. Cut to basic-training sequences right out of "Full Metal Jacket" and battlefield scenes recalling insert war movie of choice.
It's at this point that the movie really goes off the rails as Cherry returns home to escalate his drugs from Oxycontin to heroin and draw Emily into an unrelentingly dreary web of robbery and addiction. It helps that "Cherry" looks great -- director of photography Newton Thomas Sigel ("Da 5 Bloods") just earned one of the five coveted nominations from the American Society of Cinematographers -- but the Russos make it seem less like personal and essential art than shameless showing off.
Download the all new "Popcorn With Peter Travers" podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Tunein, Google Play Music and Stitcher.
And the script by Jessica Goldberg and Angela Russo-Otstot, the directors' sister, settles for juggling cliches instead of refreshing them into something like real life.
"Cherry" pushes hard to show us it's serious, but ends only as a failed attempt at Oscar bait. No matter how hard Holland tries, and he tries mightily, "Cherry" is too glossy to pass itself off as true grit.
