Cherry, review: drugs, war and Tom Holland were never so radioactively dull

• Dirs: Anthony and Joe Russo. Cast: Tom Holland, Ciara Bravo, Jack Reynor, Forrest Goodluck, Michael Gandolfini. 18 cert, 140 mins

“It’s as if all of this were built on nothing, and nothing were holding all of this together,” Tom Holland murmurs in Cherry’s opening minutes. Talk about beating your critics to the punch.

The 24-year-old English actor heads the cast of this radioactively tedious drama, which feels less like a film in any conventional sense than a sort of dramatised Oscar-season checklist. In fact, it’s an adaptation of a semi-autobiographical 2018 novel by Nico Walker, though it reduces its title character’s hair-raising life story – War! Drugs! Bank heists! – into a series of emotionally vacant, self-indulgent exercises.

Behind the camera are Marvel veterans Anthony and Joe Russo, who directed Holland as Spider-Man in the last couple of Avengers outings – and Cherry often feels like an attempt by these two accomplished superhero-wranglers to prove that even in the age of the mega-franchises, the spirit of 1970s and 1980s Hollywood endures. There is a big difference, however, between making a film that’s as rich, troubling and timely as Taxi Driver, Full Metal Jacket or Dog Day Afternoon, and making one that vaguely fancies itself as any or all of the above.

Split into chapters plus a prologue and epilogue, the plot watches Cherry evolve from a reticent college student into a much-sworn-at US Army medic, and then a PTSD-afflicted veteran who returns from Iraq to a life of armed robbery in order to fund his growing drug habit. Throughout, Holland keeps us appraised of Cherry’s inner turmoil with a dreary, relentless voice-over that involves occasional lines delivered directly to the audience mid-scene, via a glance down the camera lens.

The Russos rattle out such gimmicks in lieu of psychological depth, and with no apparent thought as to what their effect might be: the whip-pans, slow-motion interludes, fiddly camera manoeuvres and montages cut to Van Morrison only seem to be here because they’re the kind of things that happen in serious films, in the same way every comic-book movie needs a mid-credits twist. In one typically jarring case, Cherry tells us that a recruiting sergeant he meets for all of 30 seconds habitually calls people “joker” – then we cut to a split-second clip of the man in a traffic jam doing just that. But how on earth would he know this? And furthermore, who cares?

You can understand why Holland might be drawn to this kind of material, since his current stint as Spider-Man can’t go on for much longer. And only last year, he gave very good pent-up trauma in Antonio Campos’s The Devil All the Time, so these roles are not beyond his grasp. But his performance here feels empty and flat, with none of the humanising detail or diabolical glint that convince viewers to root for menaces and outcasts.

The same goes for Ciara Bravo as Cherry’s long-term girlfriend Emily, who comes across as a waifish nonentity even while appearing in stagy dreamlike cutaways, or screaming blue murder in her lover’s face. One thing the Russos have ported over intact from the Marvel stylebook is those films’ eerie sexlessness: a scene in which Holland caresses his girlfriend’s naked flank has been shot as if the actor is unveiling a new appliance from Samsung.

In a story of this size, no amount of directorial showboating elsewhere can mask its stars’ lack of chemistry – or paper over their clumsy dialogue, or distract from the absence of a thoughtful or provocative take on the subjects at hand. Cherry might represent a drastic shift in scale, tone and subject matter for its directors and leading man alike, but there’s a blockbuster-sized gap where its point should be.

Available via Apple TV+ now