Cherry Review

Cherry is a crime drama movie. It's based on Nico Walker's novel of the same name. The film is produced by AGBO and Hideaway Entertainment and distributed by Apple TV+. Cherry is written by Angela Russo-Otstot and Jessica Goldberg and directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo.

The story is a young man from Ohio named Cherry has found the love of his life and everything seems great however, things soon start to change. Cherry enlist into the army and comes back but he isn't the same man he once was. He becomes desperate to feed his opioids addiction and starts to become a serial robber. If he doesn't fix things soon Cherry could lose everything.

Initial Reaction

Now if any of you read My Most Anticipated Movies of 2021 then you can understand why I was looking forward to this movie. But for any of you who don't want to read it let me reiterate, the reason being is I think the Russo Brothers are making some pretty good movies post-MCU and I'm interested in seeing Tom Holland do something else other than Spider-Man.

Cons

My only complaint with the movie is Cherry's narration. There's quite a lot of times when it felt unnecessary. Like he tell us this we can plainly see or he'll provide characterization when we should've gotten by showing it earlier as suppose to him telling us later on in the story.

Middle Ground

One grey area with Cherry is the Russo's brothers directing. Now I can fully support directors wanting to change things up from their usual thing but here it felt odd at times. Like there's this one scene where Cherry meets Emily (his love interest) but when we pan over to her she's in focus but the background around her is blurry. I have no idea what that was about. Now the movie's first act is really slow. I understand what the writers were doing, they were trying to build up Cherry and Emily's relationship. But like I said it's really slow, but once we move past the first act things really start to pick up.

Pros

Now for the positives and one of those is Tom Holland's performance. Much like The Devil All the Time we really get to see Holland's acting range and once again he's incredible. Another thing I'll praise is Tom Holland and Ciara Bravo's chemistry. Whatever emotions they're suppose to be acting out together they made it work. And they kept that momentum going throughout the whole movie and never once missing a beat. The last thing I'll give Cherry credit for is how tragic the story. We see this guy and the woman he loves truly hit rock bottom and yet things still seem to get worse for them and yet, we get a very hopeful ending. And I like when movies do that, I like that even though we see our characters go through Hell we can still see at the end there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

Cherry is very much a flawed movie and despite that I don't think it deserves the amount of harsh criticism it's getting. Holland's acting is great, he's chemistry with Bravo was also a good highlight for the film, and even though we have a tragic story there's still hope. The mix bags are that slow first act but that can be forgiven when things pick up and once the Russo Brothers stop doing really odd things with their directing it does start to be pretty good. The only thing I didn't like was the narration.

My final rating is Okay.

Alright everyone that's going to do it for me. Come back on Monday, March 15th where I'll countdown the WORST moments from the theatrical cut of Justice League, or Josstice League as it's properly called. Until then, enjoy the rest of your day.