Welcome to Collinwood (2002)

I remember being around twelve when this came out and thinking it looked highly amusing. It's only almost two decades later that I finally put aside just over an hour to experience it. Welcome To Collinwood is nuts. George Clooney is the main man on the front cover of the film but he's only in the film for around ten minutes, if that. That said, the film is only about eighty minutes long. It's nowhere near effective enough to get fully involved or care too much, but I guess that's not really the point when the film is this ludicrous. Cosimo, a petty thief, is thrown in jail where he is told about a perfect heist by his room mate (who has a life sentence and the con is therefore wasted on him) so Cosimo turns to his girlfriend Rosalind (a hilarious Patricia Clarkson) to sort out a crew to pull it off. This includes a wheelchair bound George Clooney, who turns in a hugely amusing, if brief, display; an early performance from Sam Rockwell laying down glimpses of what was to come from him later on, and a bizarre but effective showing from William H Macy. It's lunacy from the outset, but it is mercifully short, and I did laugh, which cannot be said for many comedies. The strangest thing of all is that it's directed by the Russo brothers. Whatever happened to them I wonder? 6.0/10