WAR AND PIECES
TOM HOLLAND is Cherry, a college kid turned Army medic turned opiate addict turned serial bank robber (the film doesn’t track the turn to bestselling author) — and given all those turns of events, you can see the appeal for Joe and Anthony Russo of adapting Nico Walker’s 2018 autobiographical novel. Tell someone you’re making a film that combines a youthful romance, a bloody war story (including the traumatized aftermath), opiate addiction, a streak of bank robberies, and a prison sentence into one story, and they’ll likely tell you you’re doing too much. Fall into the trap of treating each of these segments like its own separate movie, as the Avengers: Endgame directors do, and you likely are.
It isn’t that Holland isn’t good; it’s that the talented young actor still comes off far too green and implausible for this medley of storylines. The entire movie comes off as if it were done by overzealous, Criterion-obsessed filmmakers, all shifting aspect ratios, unjustified assaults on the fourth wall, zany drug-use sequences, and booming war-is-hell scenes.
It has one good moment: a catastrophic moral climax in which Cherry is forced to pick between taking a man to the hospital or letting him die. You can predict what he chooses.
But the ugly, brutish, desperation of that choice rings loud and clear, where the film overall is just loud. And any goodwill is scrubbed away by the ending, in which an 11-year prison stint is summarized in a wordless, cloying, pan-tastic montage that bypasses all sense of character. Walker’s bestseller about a man plumbing his depths was a son of Jesus’ Son. The power of that story has been abandoned by the movie, no matter how eagerly Cherry tries to convince us otherwise.