Review: The Russo brothers turn 'Cherry' into a depressing wallow through war, PTSD, heroin addiction and more bad times

“Cherry” is a movie with a lot on its plate — including poverty, war, PTSD, addiction and crime — and nothing consequential to say about any of it.

It’s the movie that directors Anthony and Joe Russo, after helming two of the five highest-grossing movies ever (“Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame”), made because they could without grappling with whether they should. It’s a visually flashy but emotionally hollow drama that goes nowhere, and at two hours and 21 minutes, takes a long time to get there.

Based on Nico Walker’s semi-autobiographical novel, “Cherry” is the story of a young man — called Cherry and played by our current Spider-Man, Tom Holland — who we meet while he’s in the middle of robbing a bank. He’s not so busy that he can’t take time to narrate the process of bank robbery, and continue to narrate how he got where he is.

The movie then flashes back a few years, to Cherry’s life in a dead-end Ohio town in 2002, taking odd jobs tending bar and working construction. He gets a glimmer of hope in his life when he takes some college classes, and meets a pretty student, Emily (Ciara Bravo). They fall in love, but when she talks about leaving Ohio to study in Montreal, Cherry responds by enlisting in the Army. Emily drops her college plans, and the two get married before he ships out to basic training.

After an extended interlude in boot camp that will make nobody forget “Full Metal Jacket,” Cherry lands in Iraq as a medic. He sees the horrors and futility of war, and returns home to Emily with PTSD — and, before long, they both become addicted to opioids, first Oxycontin and then heroin. Bank robbery, to pay off his supplier (Jack Reyonr), soon follows.

Working off a script by Angela Russo-Otstot (the directors’ sister, with a resumé mostly in TV) and Jessica Goldberg (who most recently wrote for the Hilary Swank vehicle “Away”), the Russos pour a lot of cinematic craft into Cherry’s hard-luck tale. The visual flourishes are abundant, particularly in the bloody combat sequences, but the movie is all style and little substance.

For all of the good work put in by Holland as the self-destructive main character, and Bravo’s efforts to bring some passion to an underdeveloped character, the Russos can’t make “Cherry” into more than a dreary and familiar wallow. 

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‘Cherry’

★★

Opens Friday, March 12, in some theaters, and streaming on AppleTV+. Rated R for graphic drug abuse, disturbing and violent images, pervasive language, and sexual content. Running time: 141 minutes.