Running Time: 140 minutes. Rated R (graphic drug abuse, disturbing and violent images, widespread language and sexual content). In select theaters; March 12 on Apple TV +.
Let’s start a program called DAMRE, or the drug-abuse movie Resistance Education. We would wear our pamphlets and XL T-shirts to university classrooms and give discouraging speeches to film students who tell of troubled businessmen and addicts. Our work will be very important, Hollywood has got rid of drug addiction and desperately needs help.
Until then, however, these scripts will keep churning, and we will keep going out. The latest is “Cherry,” a lengthy adaptation of Nico Walker’s popular semi-autobiographical novel about the descent of a Cleveland student and army drug to heroin-addict criminal.
Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo of the fame of “Avengers: Endgame”, the well-worn drama gets high marks for style and proficiency, but you don’t have to be a nostradamus to know that it’s on every way. Where is the phase going. In films, such stories are a dozen bags.
“Cherry” begins with a bank robbery, and promises to inform us how our cherubic leading man fell into armed robbery. “Exotic!” Do you think. When we learn that the answer is heroin, however, the path ahead becomes completely clear.
It is to say that Walker’s real-life traces were not rich and attractive. They were, but they are better suited to the page than the screen.
The main character, named Cherry (Tom Holland), works as a bartender in early sugars in Ohio. He furiously battles with his girlfriend (Ciara Bravo), enlisted in the army and leaves for the abusive sands of Iraq where he sees the horrors of war. After coming home – that sweet girl awaits him – he is afflicted with a post-traumatic stress disorder and receives a prescribed oxycodone. Great idea, Doctor. Soon he is holding banks to pay his drug debts.
As Hollywood has gone for drugs, they have doubled for Holland. The 24-year-old Brit has starred in three major films over the past 12 months, and is playing the role of Spider-Man for Sony, which has an appealing actor, Excel. This child is a young Michael J. Why does Fox or Matthew Broderick come off as he cracks a joke, so why is his formidable attraction stopped in painful tales of conflict and ruin? The fit here is uncomfortable. He is as likable as ever, but when you shoot a gun, or shoot, you laugh.
“Cherry” is the latest addition to Ros’s roller-coaster directing resume. The brothers have one of the highest grossing films of all time, from “Avengers: Endgame”, to “You, Me and Dupree”. You never know what you are going to do with these people. But they are not the problem, the script is.
In fact, his work in the Marvel Universe – sorry, Martin Scorsese! – Has enriched his other projects. Visually, they grow up by blurring the background of a scene, pumping color or washing it away. The look is fabulous with an invite and a verve.
Plot? Not so much.
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