Wolfs review: Brad Pitt and George Clooney ‘run through their old schtick in ways that make you want to groan’

Brad Pitt and George Clooney in Wolfs | Apple

Wolfs (15) ★★☆☆☆

If a movie has nothing more on its mind than entertaining the audience, what happens when it’s not that entertaining? If the abundant charm of its veteran movie stars descends into smugness, at what point do you admit they’re just annoying? And if a film is pitched as an exercise in pure style, yet the writer/director behind it has no discernible style, what then?

These questions plague the new Brad Pitt/George Clooney crime caper Wolfs, a dead-on-arrival star vehicle written and directed by Jon Watts, here parlaying the box-office clout that comes from directing the three most recent live-action Spider-Man movies into a passionless passion project.

Brad Pitt and George Clooney in Wolfs | Apple

Which is not to say Wolfs doesn’t have a fun — albeit somewhat dated — premise. Clooney and Pitt play rival “cleaners” called in to make the dead body of a young man disappear from the upscale hotel room of a powerful New York district attorney (Amy Ryan). Needless to say, neither are thrilled about the other’s existence. Clooney, whose never-named character arrives on the scene first, seems to be under the slightly tragic impression that no one else can do what he does. So when Pitt’s character shows up on behalf of the hotel’s owner — similarly dressed in the sort of leather jacket a middle-aged dad might wear in a misguided effort to look cool — they’re both quickly disavowed of their self-styled lone-wolf status.

Titular joke established, the film proceeds to complicate the plot with twists involving bricks of a magical heroin-like drug, Eastern European gangsters, lots of bickering banter, and the introduction of a beta-male sidekick (Austin Abraham) who immediately scarpers into the snowy New York night wearing only his pants, a scene that gives way to a tediously elongated chase sequence in which both leads intimate they’re too old for this shit without actually coming right out and saying it.

But part of the problem with making a mismatched buddy movie in which the characters are effectively mirror images of each other is there’s not a lot of genuine conflict or drama to suck you in. Nowhere is this more evident than the opening act. Though it begins promisingly enough with Amy Ryan — in an otherwise thankless role — freaking out about having the bloody, unconscious body of a much younger man lying in her room (a neat twist on convention), from the moment Clooney and Pitt show up it plays like an airless piece of dinner theatre featuring two stars you remember being cool running through their old schtick in ways that just make you want to groan. In this case, that schtick is a throwback to Clooney and Pitt’s easygoing chemistry in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trilogy, a series of films that may have got progressively more pleased with themselves, but in that first movie found two stars hitting their groove and playing around with audience expectations.

Here they do the thing where they interrupt each other’s sentences and try to upend what we think we know, but it feels tired rather than inspired. Without the casual wit or the breezy French New Wave elegance of Soderbergh’s shot compositions, the dialogue and action seem very stilted. A vocal cameo from Frances McDormand also brings to mind Pitt and Clooney’s appearance in the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading; their characters — despite their crime-movie professionalism — are a hair’s breadth away from the idiotic dolts who stumble into a CIA conspiracy in that film. And there are homages to other movies too. The title, for instance, feels like a tip of the hat to Harvey Keitel’s similarly employed character in Pulp Fiction, while Theodore Shapiro’s synthy score repeatedly nods to Martin Scorsese’s cult classic After Hours — another movie with a protagonist who becomes embroiled in a nightlong odyssey in New York.

Wolfs | Apple

Alas, Watts doesn’t seem to know what to do with a film that doesn’t have the fate of the world hanging in the balance and it’s telling that his showiest shot sees him slipping back into his blockbuster comfort zone with an egregious super-slow-motion effect that temporarily gives Abraham’s character the acrobatic abilities of Spider-Man.

Of course there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to make a movie-movie that riffs on other films or simply exists in a stylised world far removed from the reality of what the characters are actually involved in. But either Watts has a very limited movie palate or he just isn’t very good at conveying his knowledge of cinema in his own filmmaking, which is a problem in a film that’s riffing and deconstructing the genre he’s working within.

Still, you can see why Pitt and Clooney wanted to do it. Like Robert Redford and Paul Newman, they’re megastars who work brilliantly together and, having already made their version of The Sting with the Oceans films, perhaps they thought this might be their Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (the ending certainly nods to it). But movie star charisma is a funny thing. It can compensate for plenty of deficiencies in a film, but when the dynamic between two stars is a little off, everything can start to look like it’s straining for effect.

Wolfs is a trifle; it’s not supposed to be taken too seriously. But it’s a trifle in which the cream has curdled, the custard has gone rancid and that spongy stuff at the bottom is starting to fizz.

Wolfs streams on AppleTV+ from today