Superhero movies may have receded from multiplexes over the past few years, but the Marvel Cinematic Universe is far from dead. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Avengers: Doomsday, set for release on December 18 (the same day as Dune: Part Three), is currently tracking toward a $400 million opening weekend, especially after July’s Spider-Man movie had the highest grossing opening weekend in box office history. $400 million for Doomsday would clear Spidey, and that’s despite the Russo Brothers directing their new film without a finished script. “We’re improvisation-based, rehearsal-based directors. We like to see what the actors bring to the characters, and sometimes you don’t get the actors until a few days or a few weeks before you shoot them. And a lot of the time, that’s when the magic happens.”
Magic? I find no spark of joy or “magic” in the work of the Russo Brothers. They’re remarkably inept filmmakers whose weaknesses have been nurtured and protected from criticism by Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige. Keep in mind that whenever the Russo Brothers strike out on their own, making original movies for Netflix like The Gray Man and The Electric State, they waste hundreds of millions of dollars on films very few will see and none will enjoy. No one’s seeing the new Avengers because of the Russos: you could plug any director absorbed into the Marvel “family” into the director’s chair on Doomsday and get the same results: a record-breaking opening weekend and yet another rebuke against those who insist Marvel’s done and the superhero era is over.
The Russos are easy to hate: unsatisfied with simply being the most commercially successful directors of all time, they despise Martin Scorsese for comparing the MCU to theme parks and remind him that, while he may have Oscars, they have box office. Playing the heel has worked, to varying degrees, for a number of Gen X artists, peers of the Russos: Quentin Tarantino, Billy Corgan, Bret Easton Ellis, Courtney Love. The difference is that those people had talent to back up their provocations. The Russos don’t. They’re not merely mediocre filmmakers, or even simply bad—they’re inept. It may be hard to make out who’s responsible for what in the flat CGI mess of all the Marvel movies, but it becomes much clearer when you see what the Russos did with $12 million in 2002 dollars.
Welcome to Collinwood, their second feature and first released in the United States, has fallen into obscurity despite a stacked cast and the Russos’ future success. You’d think more people would be curious about Collinwood, in the same way Tarantino fans might suss out a copy of My Best Friend’s Birthday, his aborted first feature, on YouTube—but are there “Russo fans” out there? There are certainly Marvel fans, but do they care about the Russos? They must know them on some level, but they don’t direct every Marvel movie, and they’re not on screen like Tom Holland and all the other traitors… is anyone “reevaluating” early work of the Russos? I can’t be the only one, but for everyone else’s sake, I hope I am.
Welcome to Collinwood is unwatchable. You’ve seen bad movies before, but whoa, this is another level of bad, like student film festival bad. What must the cast have thought, firing off their dialogue standing four abreast in wide shot after wide shot after wide shot? The Russos compose images like prepubescents handling their first camcorder; there’s no craft and no knowledge or even awareness of the fundamentals of filmmaking and film grammar. Like in the Marvel movies, the actors—among them, William H. Macy, Sam Rockwell, Luis Guzmán, Isaiah Washington, Michael Jeter, Patricia Clarkson, George Clooney—spit the most insane, cliched dialogue imaginable at each other standing stock still, while the camera remains fixed on a flat wide. It’s the grammar of a summer school student, devoid of any “magic” the Russos claim they harvest regularly.
Collinwood is ostensibly a remake of Big Deal on Madonna Street, and the Russos transpose the quartet of jewel thieves from Rome to Los Angeles; Macy, Rockwell, Washington, and Jeter are introduced standing four abreast, facing the camera and posing like superheroes. They and everyone they come into contact with can’t stop talking about “a Bellini,” the perfect heist and a silly sounding word that’s deployed constantly in the place of anything resembling a joke. As the thieves bumble and their criminal and cop counterparts dribble out pitter patter unfit for the most shameless and uninspired Tarantino ripoff. Then again, the film never tries to be anything other than PG-13, at least in spirit: besides the lack of “language,” sex, and graphic violence, Collinwood is a demonstration of the Russos’ immaturity and ignorance, their ineptitude closer to that of a child than a self-acknowledged charlatan or simpleton. Doug Liman, for example, makes no bones about his mainstream preferences and lack of curiosity; as he’s said himself, he likes McDonald’s, and when Blockbuster was still open, he rented the movie that had the most copies in stock, because that’s what’s popular, and what’s popular must be good—right? It must reach some baseline, and it must work on some level.
Nothing works in Welcome to Collinwood: it’s a disaster of insipid and annoying dialogue and the kind of clueless filmmaking that doesn’t even reach the standard set by summer workshops for pre-college students. That the Russos have gone on to direct some of the most commercially successful movies of all time is certainly surprising, but after watching Welcome to Collinwood, I understand completely why Marvel movies are what they are: unwatchable garbage for retarded children.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM