Welcome to Collinwood

Welcome to Collinwood (2002)

Genres - Comedy, Crime  |   Sub-Genres - Caper, Crime Comedy  |   Release Date - Oct 4, 2002 (USA - Limited)  |   Run Time - 86 min.  |   Countries - Germany, United States  |   MPAA Rating - R
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Review by Derek Armstrong

Producers Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney have assembled an informal troupe of Hollywood "cool kids" who like to work with them, such as Sam Rockwell, Luis Guzman, and Isaiah Washington. But when that's all you bring to the table, Welcome to Collinwood is the result. For a while, the feature debut of writer/directors Joe and Anthony Russo gets by on the actors' quirky charms. When those give way, what's left is an under-thought crime caper with a tone that swings wildly from genial to serious. Collinwood mostly avoids the self-satisfied quality of other cliquish projects -- Ben Stiller's posse of Mystery Men collaborators comes to mind -- but it does feel showy. For example, the Russos are in love with the kind of character dialogue heard only in the movies, as the crooks throw around such cutesy buzzwords as "malinski" (a patsy) and "bellini" (a surefire jackpot). Their seedy corner of Cleveland comes to life with stylized art direction that's divorced from a specific time, and it's populated with mutually acquainted shysters and hucksters shaking each other down in familiar ways. It's kind of like an open mike night and a reunion all rolled into one, and it carries the movie during certain stretches. But the spine of the story is the aforementioned "bellini," which gets waylaid by ill-considered romantic subplots, and ultimately collapses into a flat and unsatisfying finish. Among the performances, Clooney's cameo as a wheelchair-bound safecracker is actually the most memorable. Welcome to Collinwood also contains one of the final appearances from HIV-infected Michael Jeter, who plays a raspy old small-timer in a way that makes it sadly difficult to separate fiction from reality.