The Russo Brothers have directed a number of Marvel movies, namely two of the Captain America series and the last two Avengers movies. With Civil War perhaps being the weakest, these movies at the least were fun, zippy films that showed a lot creative action sequences and fun character moments. I have been wondering what Joe and Anthony could do when they weren’t working with Marvel’s intellectual property.
That chance is now with Cherry, a movie based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Nico Walker and starring the current Spider-Man Tom Holland. Available on Apple TV+, this was my chance to see if the Russos could do something without a superhero to be seen.
Cherry is the story of a young man nicknamed “Cherry”. He has no other name, and even his Army uniform just has “soldier” written where his name tag should be. The movie opens with Cherry as a working class college student, smitten with classmate Emily (Ciara Bravo). The two have a whirlwind romance of sorts, even if Cherry seems to coming on too hard, that ends when she seems to break it off and he, heartbroken, joins the Army. The break-up didn’t stick, but Cherry has to go to Iraq anyway as a medic. From there, he witnesses or takes part in a number of incidents that send him home with bad PTSD, and the Army’s efforts to help him get him, and eventually Emily, hooked on opiods. And from there, their lives just slide down into hell.
That’s a brief telling of the overall plot, and I don’t think it’s too much of a shock considering the movie opens with Cherry robbing a bank for reasons unknown but not unguessable. From there, the movie plays out over the next two hours and twenty minutes showing Cherry’s efforts to make himself feel good if not be good. Much of what happens could be an interesting story, if not one I could say I have probably seen before. Indeed, the first portion of the movie, showing Cherry and Emily’s pre-Army days, actually mostly worked. Cherry is clearly coming on too strong, and Emily’s reactions to some of what he says and does show just how uncomfortable she is at how much he says he loves her.
And then we get to the army scenes and the flaws start to show. The movie already opened with Cherry doing a mix of voice-over and addressing the camera directly as he told his story, but I watched much of this movie thinking that the Russos were trying to make up for a perhaps familiar story with throwing as many camera tricks at the audience as they could. Holland, looking thicker in the face, is doing everything he can not to come across as Peter Parker, and Bravo’s clearly not going back to her early career as a Disney Channel/Nickelodeon actress, but I don’t think there’s that much material in this movie to really set it apart from most PTSD and/or drug addict narratives.
As such, it really comes down to how the Russos chose to present this story, and the answer seems to be to do as much as possible. Different characters have the name “whomever” to show they don’t matter, and at least one bank is labeled “shitty bank”. There are all manner of camera effects, a sequence shot in a tighter aspect ratio to make the screen look more compact, and a lot of characters don’t really have proper names of any kind. The whole thing comes across as the Russos are trying too hard to do something different, and the net result is a movie that is less an interesting story about how one man dealt with the psychological aspects of both war and drug addiction and becomes one about how much an audience can tolerate something that tries to do so much it actually comes across as so much less.
Grade: C-
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