The central joke of the new movie Wolfs is that a pair of guys played by Brad Pitt and George Clooney fancy themselves one-of-a-kind, best-in-the-biz criminal fixers, but are repeatedly presented with evidence that they’re basically the same guy in two different flavors of aged handsomeness. The ego-puncturing is funny, but the conceit initially seems a little weird; who has ever confused Pitt and Clooney, two household names with decidedly different styles?
Granted, they’ve starred together in the Ocean’s films and Burn After Reading, have both played other criminal types in multiple movies, and have a similar seeming affinity for old-fashioned big-screen glamour. But they’re not exactly the original easily-confused Hollywood Chrises, either. Yet Wolfs, written and directed by Jon Watts, does its best to avoid drawing any kind of sharp contrast between the two characters, who are each called in to assist a public figure (Amy Ryan) in getting rid of a body. (An accidental death, as it turns out – and, as detailed in the trailer, not even actually a death, either.) There’s the slightest hint of Pitt’s fixer having a somewhat shorter temper, and Clooney’s fixer seeming a little less cool, but it’s almost all derived from pre-existing assumptions about their respective personas – and not all that heavily, either. Clooney isn’t playing a Danny Ocean-style charmer, and while Pitt may be operating at his default level of laconic, he’s not exactly Cliff Booth here, either.
It’s rare to see a high-profile big-star team-up repeatedly, winkingly insist that it doesn’t really matter who’s who. This insistence keeps Wolfs humble; it’s unusually low-key for a crime caper. At times, it seems like a conscious attempt to fuse Old Quentin Tarantino cool – before you even get to the title, plenty will think of Clooney and Pitt’s characters in terms of The Wolf, the fixer Harvey Keitel played in Pulp Fiction – with a Steven Soderbergh chill. But the movie never really crackles like either director’s best work or, for that matter, much like their weakest work, either. A Tarantino lark like Death Proof or a Soderbergh obscurity like The Underneath has more juice than this.
In fact, the whole situation around Wolfs does a chilling and possibly accidental job of proving its mild comic thesis. When the movie proceeds as an offbeat crime thriller, it works pretty well. There’s an extended foot-and-car chase that has precisely the kind of physical locations and visible exertions that were missing from the Spider-Man trilogy Watts directed with maximum CG stunts, and some small-scale shoot-outs that have a desolate pop. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Clooney and Pitt bring nothing to these scenes; they throw themselves into the business of running, driving, shooting, and making oh-shit faces. They do their movie star thing, looking great in a glossy production. Yet it would be accurate to say that the best parts of the movie are the parts that ask the least of its stars. The scenes where Pitt and Clooney argue and nitpick over each other’s methodology – the comic banter portions of the film – are, by and large, kind of deadly. Obvious or clunky lines outnumber funny ones by about four to one, and the movie doesn’t quite embrace the comic minimalism or bizarre flights of fancy that Soderbergh brings to the duo’s Ocean’s film.
Maybe Wolfs could have used Matt Damon in a prosthetic nose. Or maybe the film’s self-consciousness doesn’t play the same as Soderbergh’s version of self-consciousness from 15 or 20 years ago, when Clooney and Pitt underplaying their glamour was, in and of itself, genuinely glamorous – that they could lead an all-star heist movie with such no-fuss aplomb. Those changes are where the extratextual details of the movie’s release come in: Wolfs was originally intended to be a theatrical release, like Apple’s recent Fly Me to the Moon, via Sony before turning up on Apple TV+ some time down the line. After Moon – also a teaming of two big-name stars – bombed, Wolfs was downgraded to a one-week limited release (seemingly no longer from Sony, whose logo did not appear at the press screening), hitting Apple on September 27th. Amazingly, it will debut on Apple before Moon does.
On one hand, this is a nice-looking, big-budget picture with two major stars, retrofitted back into a glorified TV movie. On the other, the movie doesn’t make much of a case for its own big-screen worthiness. Not because it’s bad (it’s perfectly watchable, if not exactly pulse-quickening) or even bad-looking (it’s probably the sleekest-looking Watts movie yet), but because it positions Clooney and Pitt as a couple of smooth operators who probably aren’t quite as special or beloved as they think they are. There should be a subversive charge to a star vehicle that undercuts the ego that’s supposed to keep it running. Yet if anything, Wolfs turns mildly sentimental as the two fixers grow, if not closer, more tolerant of their obvious similarities. That minor-key bromance is the only aspect of their characters that feels correctly judged to Pitt and Clooney’s strengths – and it’s pretty thinly developed, even for a crime comedy. The movie spends most of its time selling two of the biggest movie stars of this century as past-prime ciphers, then admits it was just kidding about all that kidding. Why, it’s sort of like a massive company demoting a wide theatrical release to a cursory few-hundred theaters, then turning around and hyping its streaming debut as a marquee attraction. Wolfs turns out to be the perfect movie for a Hollywood that knows size still matters, but isn’t sure why, or in what direction.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
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