Truth, beauty, and good movies are in the eye of the beholder. Take, for instance, Jon Watts’ first post-Spider-Man feature film, Wolfs. It’s a crime caper starring two of the last real Movie Stars, George Clooney and Brad Pitt, it’s set in the world of New York’s criminal underbelly, and it has Amy Ryan in a notable supporting role. It’s also basic to the point of boring—lesser stars than Clooney and Pitt would not be able to save it.
Wolfs depends entirely on the combined charisma of Clooney and Pitt, which is either charmingly old-school, or an underwritten film benefiting from the capability and screen presence of two old pros. Is it good? Is it bad? How high is your tolerance for George Clooney and Brad Pitt?
Set over a single night in New York City, Wolfs follows the misadventures of two of New York’s best “fixers”, men who make problems go away. When a district attorney (Amy Ryan) maybe kills a maybe sex worker in her hotel room, she calls in a nameless fixer (Clooney) to get rid of her inconvenient indiscretion. Mid-fix, however, he is joined by another nameless fixer (Pitt), intent on performing the same task. The two unnamed fixers must then work together to figure out what’s really going on. The two men and their maybe corpse traipse through the city on an odyssey that recalls films like Michael Mann’s crime classic, Collateral, though without any of the insight or thematic ambition.
Comparisons to Ocean’s 11 are apt, not least because Wolfs feels like a film Steven Soderbergh would make over a slow weekend. Years in the Marvel factory seems to have dulled Jon Watts’ edges, gone are the spiky nerves and sharp words of a film like Cop Car. In their place is a kind of cinematic Ken Doll smoothness, a toothless approximation of cool. It’s one thing to make a lighthearted film, Ocean’s 11 is a lighthearted film, but it still has compelling characters and real tension. Wolfs, however, keeps the two fixers so blank—they’re never named and identifying features are kept to a minimum, though they share many commonalities, like reading glasses—it’s impossible to care about them on any level beyond the aesthetic. And the film only has tension when Amy Ryan is on screen.
But such is the power of Clooney and Pitt’s combined star power that Wolfs is still watchable. Will you care about the film at any point? Probably not. Will you remember it? Almost certainly no. But it will pass 108 minutes in reasonably entertaining fashion. It’s not unpleasant, and there is a certain appeal in watching two old pros go about their business, both in the cinematic sense—Movie Stars are fun to watch—and in the narrative sense, as the film is essentially just the process of the two fixers working out everything going wrong in the moment. They’re engaged in a night-long conversation about What We Do Next, it’s Before Sunrise for the murder crowd.
You could say Wolfs is the kind of film that doesn’t get made much anymore, but it’s so mediocre it’s also reminder you can’t just coast on the charisma of your leads. This film needs something, either better jokes or a grittier crime plot, it needs to be either funnier or darker, anything just to make it interesting. Because they DON’T make films like this much anymore, but when the films are so bland, like Wolfs, it’s hard to defend their continued existence. Still, if you just want to bask in the glow of George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s stardom, if you’ll forgive any sin for the sake of watching Movie Stars be Movie Stars, then Wolfs has a kind of waiting-room charm. You’ll forget it once it’s over, but it’s a nice enough way to pass the time while it’s happening.
Wolfs is now playing in theaters, and will stream on Apple TV+ from September 27, 2024.
Here's Brad with Ines de Ramon at Rock4EB 2024 in Malibu on the weekend.
