Wolfs is so confident that it can entirely coast on the incredible chemistry between its two leads, George Clooney and Brad Pitt, that it doesn’t even give their characters names. Certainly Pitt and Clooney have indeed demonstrated great chemistry in movies before, namely in Soderbergh’s Oceanses, and by all accounts they’re good-time pals IRL, too. So you’d think this calculus would check out. But it doesn’t, mostly because the script that surrounds them turns out to be as flimsy as the initial hypothesis about the chemistry. Sure, it’s fun to watch these two charmingly bounce off each other, but that’s virtually all that Wolfs has to offer. There’s not actually a movie going on here.
We get started late one night when a big time politician (Amy Ryan) has a problem. There’s a dead body in her hotel room. After a few minutes of panic, she calls our guy Clooney, evidently a fixer who walks her through a couple of first steps, intoning “Nobody else can do what I do.” Except for Brad Pitt’s character, of course, who shows up to interrupt Clooney’s cleanup job. Through some rather absurd hoop jumps, then, the pair end up having to work together to fix the problem. It’s an engaging enough premise, and Ryan at this point makes a good foil Pitt and Clooney’s alleged hyper-competence with her own panic. Unfortunately, she disappears from the movie from this point forward.
What’s left is the banter between the two fellas, which offers up a 100-minute dick-measuring contest, each one of them trying to out-grump and one-up the other. The gruffness on display is certainly amusing, but it also grows monotonous with each passing minute. The injection of a third party, a kid (Austin Abrams) the guys wind up having to protect from a big drug deal he’s got caught up in, doesn’t really do anything to change up the tone: rather than saying grouchy shit to each other, they’re saying it to each other and to the kid.
Director Jon Watts, finally free from a decade of Marvel Cinematic Universe traffic-copping after the last three Spider-Mans, seems eager to get back to his lo-fi thriller roots (his 2015 movie Cop Car is a tight little marvel of narrative escalation), but he relies too much on both contrivance and a gag where Pitt and Clooney understand what’s happening to them but we never really understand it (again, shades of Oceans). On the other hand, he executes his action sequences pretty sturdily, particularly a mid-movie car/foot chase in a snow-dusted city that’s put together out of some fun long takes and clever use of some fun trick shots. There’s also a playful, initially pretty suspenseful scene set at a gangster’s wedding that does a good job of being simultaneously funny and dreadful, even if it winds up being a total digression in the grander scheme.
In truth, Watts can’t be faulted for falling back on his stars to carry what’s clearly intended to be more of a confection than anything else. But there simply isn’t enough formal or narrative novelty around them to make their back-and-forth seem much more than perfunctory. It’s not even a case of feeling left out of the good time they’re having — in fact, they seem a little bored themselves. So while Wolfs isn’t without its fleeting pleasures, in the end it’s almost impressive how expertly the film squanders its sole reason for existence.
DIRECTOR: Jon Watts; CAST: Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Austin Abrams, Amy Ryan; DISTRIBUTOR: Apple Original Films; IN THEATERS: September 20; STREAMING: September 27; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 48 min.