Wolfs almost seems like a parody of a lot of things: fixer thrillers, money-burning Apple Originals, Brad Pitt and George Clooney cinematic bro-outs. But just as writer/director Jon Watts’ movie is about to land one of its punchlines, it’ll fumble the bag, distracted either by one of its other tongue-in-cheek preoccupations or by antithetical pulls towards sincerity and logic. Wolfs becomes, then, an experience as contradictory as its plural-but-not title. It’s a star vehicle intent on dulling its leads’ shine, a slick blockbuster relying on narrative and visual restrictions, a cynical movie about the power of friendship. And yet, even as Wolfs undermines itself, it’s a charmingly prickly (or charming, despite its prickliness) mess.
And cleaning up complicated messes is where Wolfs’ lone wolf leads come in. George Clooney and Brad Pitt play unnamed fixers in cool leather jackets, which means that we mainly think of them as “George Clooney” and “Brad Pitt.” (Which is part of the point.) They’re both called up to the same blood-soaked hotel room, where a dead teen, a district attorney (Amy Ryan), and a couple bricks of heroin await their expertise. Only, as per the rules of this character archetype, they work alone.
Forced to work with a professional peer, the two balk and complain and snipe at one another. Clooney growls and grumbles while Pitt kicks his feet up and smugly smirks. Apart from Watts’ amusing premise, his gags often feel like underwritten hate-riffing—the kind of repetitive, sluggishly cut, “keep going until it’s funny” ball-busting that stretches out the runtimes of Judd Apatow films.
It’s also not something Clooney and Pitt, two of the most charismatic men to grace the big screen, excel at. Their tough underworld pros struggle to suppress the snappy back-and-forth rhythm that helps drive the Ocean’s movies, and struggle further to bury their magnetism beneath the script’s muttered bickering. The awkward unpleasantness isn’t just awkward and unpleasant to sit through, but noticeably forced; the tonal equivalent of those baseball caps celebrities use to half-heartedly disguise their otherworldly beauty.
This oppressive atmosphere remains mostly confined to the film’s exhausting first act, before Wolfs expands beyond its penthouse suite and allows its scope to broaden from the simple sketch premise of its opening. As Clooney and Pitt get to move around, their characters growing closer as they see the silly contrivances of the plot through the prototypical genre bullet points (an underground doctor, a car chase, an interrogation, a shootout), the film begins abandoning its arrogant subversive streak. The jokes become warmer, the star power notches up its brightness from dark mode to—at the very least—a power-saver setting, and the camera exhales, freed from the stagnant hotel air.
Now that Watts, coming off of three straight Spider-Man movies for the Marvel machine, isn’t completely locked to the demands of previsualization and green screens, he veers into a similar kind of stylish overcorrection as the Russo brothers did with their abysmal Cherry. Rather than delve into dizzying, grab-bag pretension, though, Watts operates with an anonymous slickness his no-name characters could appreciate.
Watts reunites with his Cop Car DP Larkin Seiple to shoot a snow-flecked NYC evening like they’re selling luxury watches, dark and lovely and intangible—always on the verge of crossfading into the face of a perfectly machined timepiece. A few well-conceived sequences, shot with patient and creative framing choices, build tension earnestly, rolling the irony-laden stillness of the beginning into a tarp and throwing it in the trunk. The pop-dropping soundscape, prominently featuring Sade’s “Smooth Operator,” makes the crime caper into an easily digestible slow jam. By the time Clooney and Pitt are formulating and executing plans together, their gruff old-timers now begrudgingly buddy-buddy, Wolfs looks and feels a lot like the movies it initially observes from a dry distance.
It’s an ostensible failure that Wolfs only finds success once it abandons its initial ironic self-awareness and succumbs to the template…but it’s also hard to deny that success once it arrives. There’s an irrepressible power to old, tired, Advil-popping Clooney and Pitt glancing at each other with knowing affection. The pair playing off of a naïve youngblood, Euphoria’s Austin Abrams (who comes out on top, playing a wired kid who finds himself wrapped up in the fixers’ mess), taps into a bittersweet torch-passing that transcends the half-committed text of the film. Even if the script attempts to answer its own unanswerably dumb questions, even if it tries drowning its leads in mush-mouthed arguments, even if its ideas happily double-cross each other throughout, Wolfs can’t sink the effervescent pleasures of two elder Adonises throwing their backs out in a throwback piece of pop-pulp. Watts might have tried his best to screw Wolfs up, but in the end, the job got done. It turns out the real fixer was friendship all along.
Director: Jon Watts
Writer: Jon Watts
Starring: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Amy Ryan, Austin Abrams, Poorna Jagannathan
Release Date: September 20, 2024
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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