It’s been a huge year for George Clooney getting rid of people. In an age where streaming platforms and clueless executives have been trying to enforce a “No More Movie Stars” mandate, Clooney spent about 15 solid years giving us smarmy lead turns that played on his uncanny ability to come across like a particularly charismatic working man. Danny Ocean, Michael Clayton, and Ryan Up-In-The-Air were impossibly handsome and charming, yes, but they also got tired, tried to hustle to a more comfortable life, and knew how to get along with others.
On paper, it’s why something like Wolfs should work, not just because Clooney is back in the saddle, playing a criminal who offsets his steely determination with smooth charm, but because he’s paired with another champion of “What if hot people did crimes?” casting, Brad Pitt. Pitt, like Clooney, knows that the most compelling larger-than-life characters often look like they’d rather be doing something else—remember when he reluctantly taught poker to Topher Grace in Ocean’s Eleven? That “I wish I was above this” vibe capably carries through to his most recent performances as stuntman Cliff Booth in Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood and hitman Ladybug in Bullet Train.
In Wolfs, Clooney and Pitt have weaponized their sizzling, banter-filled chemistry to play lone wolf “fixers” reluctantly paired on the same crime clean-up, but a couple of fatal mistakes prevent the film from being a satisfying throwback to their double-barreled charm—chief among them writer-director Jon Watts. Watts can’t deliver a worthy crime romp for these deserving talents, nor does he know how to spin Clooney and Pitt’s put-upon everyman charm into gold, leaving us with two leads matching each other’s tired energy in a film that is laborious when it should be electric.
The first non-Spider-Man film from writer-director Watts since 2015’s Cop Car, Wolfs unfolds over an eventful night in New York, where the two fixers’ usual routines are upended by their own insecurities around not being the best in the biz, and further spirals out of control when the cadaver they have to dispose of (Euphoria’s Austin Abrams) starts running around in his underwear. Perhaps the fact that this premise, with this cast, sounds like the platonic ideal of a movie is what sets it up for failure—over its five-year lifetime, Apple TV+ has gained a reputation for rolling out projects that sound like something worth watching, overspending on the sheen-heavy films and burying the more interesting ones. Wolfs is the perfect marriage of material and distributor: If you want to make a costly, near-lifeless mistake and have it hidden away for no one to discover it, you make a film for Apple TV+.
There are plenty of pithy insults to throw at Wolfs—Is it the first film directed by a BMW sponsorship, or a feature-length version of those Super Bowl commercials where actors reprise iconic characters to promote crypto?—but it’s the kind of misfire worth unpacking from the inside. Clooney’s unnamed fixer has been called in by Margaret (Amy Ryan), a “tough on crime” district attorney who now has a twentysomething kid lying immobile on the floor of her penthouse suite. Pitt’s fixer has been called in by the hotel manager to ensure that the expensive new hotel stays clear of controversy. Unbeknownst to them all, there’s a backpack stuffed with four bricks of heroin in the hotel room that’ll throw a monkey wrench in their plans A, B, and C.
From the moment our fixers clock each other in the bloody, glass-strewn suite, something is clearly off—the flat angles of Larkin Seiple’s cinematography and Andrew Weisblum’s leaden editing plainly reveal that Watts has not given his comedy any rhythm or his drama any tension. The following 100 minutes spends far too long watching two famous faces regard each other with a deadpan disbelief that reads instead as disaffected disinterest.
Clooney and Pitt have great chemistry—we have three Soderbergh films and three seconds of a Coen brothers movie to prove it—but the dialogue sparking it has always been cute and snappy, and their characters felt driven. When Danny and Rusty disagreed in Ocean’s Eleven, it was like watching charisma fireworks; when their urgency was synchronized, no one could get in their way. Watts instead strands his actors to riff for painful stretches of dramatic stalling, as our two fixers bicker about who has the better moves or connections. Everything they talk about is vague, gesturing at a whole world of secret maneuvers and liaisons that comes across as insubstantial rather than elegant. The premise of Wolfs necessitates that two nearly identical crime movie archetypes lead the action, but when Clooney and Pitt speak in their matching gravelly pitch, it becomes clear how uninteresting it is to watch a film with characters who don’t like each other because of how similar they are.
Outside of Clooney, Pitt, and Abrams, every character in Wolfs is present for exactly one scene. Amy Ryan as the DA, Poorna Jagannathan as a surgeon for wounded criminals, and Zlatko Burić as a Croatian gangster all enter the movie and then exit it in an episodic series of guest stars that would be more enjoyable if it felt like any of them were sharing the same story. But Wolfs so enthusiastically gives up on having a narrative that Watts neglects to realize that a convoluted, overstuffed plot is what these kinds of character comedies thrive on—his characters joke around a lot, but they have nothing to joke about, because every new obstacle is introduced just before the scene it happens in.
Wolfs isn’t interested in being a splashy action vehicle, but the Clooney fixer’s insistence on seeing everything as a conspiracy would be much more enjoyable if there were enough happening in the story to warrant such paranoid speculation. A comedy taking advantage of the typecasts of its two very famous leads comes with a certain self-awareness, but this love letter to the mid-budget romps of 2000s Hollywood stops at its casting and never extends to the craft that made those films notable.
Watts is keen on the surface texture of the behind-closed-doors subgenre of criminal flicks, but doesn’t understand how narratives like Michael Clayton or Mr. & Mrs. Smith function, how character depth naturally comes from exciting personalities reacting and responding to a detailed plot. Wolfs finally picks up in the last act when our fixers are forced to make a moral decision after Abrams’ unwitting, blabbering drug runner (the young actor doing a commendable job injecting some comedy into the film) has made his impact. But the dark, flat, ugly look of the action sucks the fun out of the chaotic final movements. Forget these two charisma-sapped bagmen; not even Michael Clayton could clean up this mess.
Director: Jon Watts
Writer: Jon Watts
Starring: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Amy Ryan, Austin Abrams, Poorna Jagannathan
Release Date: September 20, 2024
