Relentlessly bleak Cherry feels like it never ends

With the combined starpower of Spider-Man star Tom Holland and his Marvel directors the Russo brothers, we were expecting a lot more from Cherry.

Given the world knows him as Spider-Man, a socially awkward, ethically pure but physically powerful teenager, it’s understandable Tom Holland, 24, might want to do something grittier.

And, of course, he would trust Avengers: Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo – who cast him as Peter Parker for his first appearance in Captain America: Civil War – to not lead him astray.

But astray they did lead him.

Because for all of Holland’s undeniable talent, Cherry is a relentlessly bleak movie too wrapped up in indulging in unnecessary stylistic choices designed to distract from the fact the will to finish this two-hour-and-20-minutes movie is sapped from you with each scene.

Not even the emotional depth or compassion Holland plunges into his unnamed character can save Cherry. Only a ruthless editor that would’ve been willing to cut 60 minutes out of it could have.

Cherry is directed by Avengers: Endgame’s Joe and Anthony Russo.

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Adapted from Nico Walker’s book, Cherry is the story of a listless college kid from the American city of Cleveland.

He (Holland) falls in love with classmate Emily (Ciara Bravo) while also hanging out with his mates, popping the occasional ecstasy tablet.

Emily says she doesn’t think love actually exists, that’s just “pheromones playing tricks on people”, to which he replies that he loves her. Soon after she tells him she’s moving to Montreal for school. Unable to cope with the crushing disappointment, he enlists for the army as a medic – but also because he admits he didn’t have any better ideas.

His experiences in Iraq – and the war action sequences, which we know the Russos can helm, are some of the better scenes in Cherry – haunt him and when he returns home after two years on the battlefield, his PTSD turns into a full-blown drug addiction.

Cherry is relentlessly bleak.

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Cherry reads like a movie that’s supposed to be a dissection of how someone like its protagonist ends up shooting heroin into his veins, living in filth and robbing banks. It has a lot of empathy for its lead and the near-impossible situation he finds himself in.

And it’s also trying to indict the many institutions which failed him – the government and the military for sending them over there in the first place and for then ignoring his plight when he returns, the banks for their ruthlessness and the profit-driven culture which created the opioid epidemic in the first place, carelessly doling out oxycodone as a band-aid for deeper issues.

But Cherry is bogged down in its own self-importance, and really makes you work for what is actually a pretty simple and well-trodden story. Rather than have the discipline in telling that story in an affecting and punchy way, it expends so much energy trying to be showy.

Tom Holland does what he can with pretty terrible material.

It criminally overuses combinations of slow motion and opera music to scream, “this is so tragic!”, as if the needles and vomit didn’t already do that. And the script’s faux-philosophical ruminations on life feels like it was lifted out of a poetry slam rather than grounding the character in specificity.

That you have any investment at all in the character’s fate is down to Holland’s performance, doing what he can with the material he’s been given.

But perhaps Cherry’s most baffling choice is to have both a voiceover narration and direct fourth wall breaks with Holland directly addressing the viewer. There’s no consistency on why it chooses one over the other at any given time and it never justifies why it’s doing either.

All that serves to drag down a movie that feels like it’ll never end.

Rating: 2/5

Cherry is streaming now on Apple TV+

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Originally published as Relentlessly bleak Cherry feels like it never ends