Can movie stars stay cool forever?
That seems to be the big existential question underscoring the clever, impeccably directed if rather flimsy action comedy Wolfs , which reunites Brad Pitt and George Clooney, who most memorably chummed it up together in the Ocean’s trilogy. Back then they were two of the biggest actors on the planet, and even an effort like the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading — which marks their last onscreen team-up — grossed over $160 million while remaining totally offbeat and frankly uncommercial.
Wolfs
The Bottom Line
Still cool as cucumbers.
Release date: Friday, Sep. 27 (Apple TV+)
Cast: Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Amy Ryan, Austin Abrams, Poorna Jagannathan, Zlatko Burić, Richard Kind
Director, screenwriter: Jon Watts
1 hour 48 minutes
More than a decade later, both stars are in their 60s and the movie business clearly isn’t what it used to be. Case in point: Wolfs, which was supposed to be released wide by Apple, will roll out for a one-week limited theatrical run before going straight to streaming. Is it because Pitt and Clooney can no longer draw the crowds they did in their heyday? Or is it because Americans no longer flock to see films that aren’t based on existing IP? (Which begs another question: Are Pitt and Clooney themselves a form of existing IP?)
Either way it’s unfortunate, because Wolfs is a work that deserves big-screen attention — instead of being viewed in bed on a MacBook that’s resting on top of your crotch. Written and directed by Jon Watts, who, after a lengthy stint in the Marvel Universe, returns to the caper mode of his 2015 breakthrough Cop Car, the movie has twists galore and showcases a slick, deadpan style you hardly see in Hollywood anymore. Both fun and thin at the same time, it’s not about much in the end except the idea of reuniting Pitt and Clooney to see if they still have their magic, which they mostly do.
Both play “cleaners” or “fixers” — think Jean Reno in La Femme Nikita or Harvey Keitel, the first and most famous Wolf, in Pulp Fiction — who get hired for a job that winds up stretching out for one long, snowy and action-packed New York night. That job entails helping a district attorney (Amy Ryan) get rid of a dead body in her luxury hotel room, but it quickly spirals into much more. The body, in fact, is not dead at all, and belongs to a gabby, nervous wreck of a kid (Austin Abrams), who happens to be carrying four kilos of heroine in his book bag.
Pitt and Clooney (we’ll call them that since their characters have no names) both claim to be the best and only fixers in the city — lone wolves who excel at the impossible. Now they’ve been forced to work together, and you don’t have to have seen Bad Boys, 48 Hours, Lethal Weapon or a dozen other buddy action comedies to figure out that the two will go from being major antagonists to best pals, or at least frenemies.
Watts teases out the tension and humor between them in every scene, getting plenty of mileage off their slightest gestures or facial expressions, especially during a few sequences where there’s hardly any dialogue at all. Like in Cop Car, or his excellent TV series, The Old Man , the director has a knack for staging visual comedy and action with only a few shots and cuts — the opposite of what most overshot action movies do.
At its best moments, Wolfs takes that style to extreme lengths, in what’s basically a two-hander set on lots of empty Manhattan streets, or inside Clooney’s comfy BMW. A few other characters are brought in, including the aforementioned “kid,” a doctor (Poorna Jagannathan) working out of a restaurant in Chinatown, and an Albanian mob boss (Zlatko Burić) whose daughter’s wedding the two crash in one over-the-top scene.
But like Pitt and Clooney, none of these characters feels like real people. They’re occupants of a movie world closer to the ’90s-era meta-fictions of Tarantino than anything real or contemporary. Which means that whether they live or die, shoot one another or hug it up, finish as besties or arch enemies, doesn’t seem to matter all that much.
This is not to say that Pitt and Clooney don’t completely carry the film — they do it hands down from start to finish. But as cunning and well-made as Wolfs is, with its nonstop twists and sleek shoot ’em up sequences, perhaps there isn’t all that much to carry in the end.
As for the question at the top of this review, at one point the kid, who’s as nerdy a New Yorker as they come, tells Pitt and Clooney how cool they are. And it’s true they do some very cool things, like when Clooney bags a body in the hotel room in one quick swoop, brings it casually downstairs on a luggage rack and kicks it into the trunk of his Beemer. Even when, later on, he and Pitt have to simultaneously take out their old man reading glasses, they seem cool as cucumbers.
But does everyone still think that? If you were to ask a bunch of random teenagers or people in their 20s today, it’s possible they don’t even know who the actors are or what films they’ve done. And it’s also quite possible they don’t watch many films at all anymore, if they ever did.
And so if Wolfs is about anything, perhaps it’s about testing whether Hollywood stars exert the same power and fascination they did when movies seemed to matter much more to the general public. The results of that test are yet to be known, and Wolfs leaves us with a final image of Pitt and Clooney suspended together in action, as if to say: If they no longer have us, at least they have each other.
Full credits
Release date: Friday, Sep. 27 (Apple TV+)
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition)
Production companies: Freshman Year, Plan B, Smokehouse Pictures
Cast: Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Amy Ryan, Austin Abrams, Poorna Jagannathan, Zlatko Burić, Richard Kind
Director, screenwriter: Jon Watts
Producers: Jon Watts, Dianne McGunigle, Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, George Clooney, Grant Heslov
Cinematographer: Larkin Seiple
Production designer: Jade Heal
Costume designer: Amy Wescott
Editor: Andrew Weisblum
Composer: Theodore Shapiro
Casting director: Rachel Tenner
Rated R
1 hour 48 minutes
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