Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Cherry’ on Apple TV+, in Which the Russo Bros. Direct Tom Holland in an Ambitious Mess

Apple TV+’s Cherry is a post-Marvel work from some key players in the world’s biggest cinematic universe. Directors Joe and Anthony Russo (Avengers: Endgame and Infinity War, two Captain America films) pal up with current Spider-Man actor Tom Holland for this adaptation of Nico Walker’s semi-autobiographical novel Cherry. Holland’s non-MCU work has been rough lately — 2020 crime-drama The Devil All the Time was divisive, and his current sci-fi romp Chaos Walking is tanking. So will Cherry give him a chance to truly prove his range, or make us wonder if he’s just a one-trick Spidey?

CHERRY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A loaded question: “Where do you want to start?” asks the narrator. “How about at the beginning?”, we all yell at the screen. PROLOGUE 2007 reads a subtitle, and the narrator, who’s never given a name although the credits call him Cherry (Holland), talks right at the camera as if we were right there in the bank with him, the bank that he’s robbing at gunpoint. The next subtitle reads PART ONE 2002, so all that stuff we just saw was a FRAMING DEVICE, which is an exciting thing that happens in the middle or end of the story but is put at the faux-beginning of the story so the actual beginning isn’t boring. So much for starting at the beginning.

So. In 2002, our protagonist is a teenage college kid with a garbage job at an Italian restaurant and a slightly overbaked sarcasto-noir voiceover that surely works better in a book than in a movie. There’s a scene in which he walks into a bank to dispute an overdraft fee and he’s told that he paid off one fee and this fee is a new fee, which is precisely the kind of shit that threatens to turn a mild-mannered going-nowhere dude like this into Tyler Durden. Thankfully something runs counter to his frustration, and her name is Emily (Ciara Bravo), a classmate who wears a signature white ribbon tied around her neck. Soon enough, she’s wearing the ribbon and not much else, and he’s in love. When he tells her exactly that, her reply is, “Thank you,” and next thing you know, she says she’s leaving for a school in Montreal and they’re kaput and our protagonist is cracked right in half.

In his moment of despair, our guy goes and does an impulsive thing and gets himself into a world of crap: he joins the Yoo-nited States Army. Then Emily comes back to him and they make up and quick get married and boy, he effed up, because there’s no reneging on your recruiter. Remember that subtitle about it being 2002? That was when the Iraq War was in full swing, and right after his full metal jacket sequence — including a deep-in-the-colon POV cam when the military doc checks if anything’s going on in there — he’s shipped to that hell on earth to be a combat medic. “SOLDIER” reads the nametag on his fatigues, which is funny right? Ducking bullets in the middle of a firefight, he shoves a man’s bowels back into his cavity, but it’s only after that when things get truly horrifying.

After his tour of traumatic duty, he returns home to Emily and a Medal of Valor, and falls apart. He’s violently angry, has nightmares, looks in a mirror and sees a different version of himself. The prescription Xanax isn’t working so he switches to oxy, and next thing you know, he’s frequenting a man known only as Pills and Coke (Jack Reynor) so he and Emily can get their heroin fix. After a while — or maybe it’s soon, it’s had to tell — it gets ugly. So ugly, our fella owes money to Pills and Coke who owes money to an entity known only as Black, and none of this is any good. Where does one get large amounts of money quickly? The place that dicked him out of a coupla overdraft fees, of course. It works, and then he starts knocking over Shitty Bank and U.S. Prank and Capitalist One and Bank F—s America branches, and I’m not making those up, that’s what the signs on the places actually say, which just complicates the morality of this godforsaken endeavor.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The gotta-get-a-fix scenes are like Trainspotting or Requiem for a Dream for millennials, the war stuff is reminiscent of David O. Russell’s extraordinary Three Kings, the war-trauma stuff brings to mind The Hurt Locker or American Sniper and the WGAF snark feels half-borrowed from Fight Club.

Performance Worth Watching: Cherry gives Holland opportunities to exercise snide comedy and some heavy drama, and is a better vehicle for him than the grim The Devil All the Time. He’s capable of greatness outside the confines of superherodom, but he’s yet to get the right script.

Memorable Dialogue: Voiceover description of the first day of basic training: “The room smelled of balls, unwashed, and feet, ditto.”

Sex and Skin: Just some sexy underwear shots.

Our Take: Cherry seeks the median tone between tenacious drama and sneering satire, but never really finds it. The latter frequently undermines the seriousness of the former, and the narrative is chopped into episodic chunks — here’s a romance, here’s a war film, here’s a drug-addiction drama, here’s a crime spoof — to the point where the movie’s overall intent never crystallizes. Do we like these people? Yes, no, I dunno. Are their troubles dramatically viable? For sure. Do we feel kind of bad that the movie treats their story of trauma and suffering as a half-assed black comedy that’s a shade too glib for its own good? Absolutely.

The Russos answer for these tonal struggles is to be stylish as hell: crisply directed action, rooms bathed in Captain America blues and reds, a climactic side-scroll tracking shot that segues neatly through the fifth (or maybe sixth?) and final vignette in this shaky mini-epic. I hesitate to criticize their desire to make the film visually interesting, but the look-mom-I’m-a-director flash clashes with any attempts to credibly address the subject matter. Maybe a full commitment to satire would’ve worked, but its attempt to do all things renders it wishy-washy. It’s too-long at 142 minutes, and the shakes-and-sweats passing-out-with-a-needle-in-your-arm addiction section that makes up a large chunk of the final hour borders on miserable. Well before it reaches the second piece of its framing device, you’ll be ready for it to be over.

Our Call: SKIP IT. You’ll admire Holland’s efforts here, but Cherry is a misfire as both drama and comedy.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Cherry on Apple TV+