Jon Watts’ action comedy reunites George Clooney and Brad Pitt 16 years after they shared the screen in Burn After Reading – unfortunately, there’s little action or comedy to be found here.
There was a time when an odd couple-style action flick starring Clooney and Pitt would have been box office gold. Unfortunately, that time isn’t now, and since Wolfs has a sedentary life on streaming ahead of it, its fate unknowingly matches its tone: forgettable.
The new movie stars Clooney and Pitt as “Margaret’s man” and “Pam’s man”, two fixers who are both mistakenly hired for the same clean-up job. Since both are intent on working alone, their newly-established partnership is a disappointment. (A point that’s oversold by their too-frequent “f**k you” quips to each other.)
But when they attempt to remove the body of a young man from a high-profile district attorney’s hotel room, they find themselves getting into more than they bargained for. Fortunately, they’re both good fixers – just not good enough to fix this movie.
The Clooney and Pitt pair-up is wasted
It’s undeniable that Clooney and Pitt were both, at one time or another, the coolest guys in any room. Wolfs is attempting to capitalize on this faded reputation by putting them both in black leather jackets and having the two stars deliver every line of dialogue with a blasé expression of disinterest and stoicism.
Unfortunately, the movie has completely missed the mark of what made the two so watchable for all these years: their charm, of which Wolfs has none.
There’s no sense of fun, no allowance for silliness that might allow Clooney and Pitt to flex their comedic chops outside of a few strong takes on subpar dialog. (Pitt’s bursting delivery of “That’s how everyone starts their day!” produced one laugh from me during the entire runtime.)
What’s more, the two characters are completely interchangeable. Neither has a unique trait that distinguishes them from the other, rendering the central thesis of “Man, I hate this guy,” to be pretty baffling and, ultimately, useless. It’s hard to imagine why Clooney and Pitt took these roles at all, since the dull and monotone fixers give them nothing to chew on.
Wolfs attempts to be self-referential in this regard, with Kid (Austin Abrams) even telling them, “You’re, like, basically the same guy.” A good in-joke, if the movie had bothered to then rectify this at any point.
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A sense of style is missing in action
While Clooney and Pitt do their best at chugging through the multiple instances of “f**k you”, “asshole”, and “dumbass”, the movie does little to elevate the action. There’s no distinguishable style here, so Wolfs is left feeling like a product of the algorithm rather than a vision brought to life.
In that sense, the biggest failure of Wolfs is that, really, it’s kind of vibeless. Outside of a few instances of Clooney showing off some genuinely impressive moves (transporting the body out of the hotel and into his trunk via luggage trolley), that’s about the extent of slickness to be found.
Wolfs review score: 2/5
Wolfs isn’t offensively bad or boring, and there’s a good movie buried in there somewhere. But it’s weighed down by a reliance on the names leading it, despite the fact that they’ve been given nothing of real value to do.
The integral feud between the two fixers makes no sense, and there might have been a greater sense of play if the two had grown to hate each other rather than despise their counterpart straight off the bat. The reality is that Clooney and Pitt both have their characters shut down and close off immediately, and who wants to watch that for an hour and 48 minutes?
There are moments that tease what could have been; Margarets’s man’s Bond-like capabilities in the field, the slow-motion car jump scene that was hyped up in the trailer, and Abrams’ impressively played monologue in which he recounts his day in excruciating detail.
You’d struggle to find any charisma or true watchability in Wolfs, a fact made all the more frustrating with the knowledge that, underneath it all, those things could exist under this weak screenplay and empty adventure.
Wolfs will premiere globally on Apple TV+ on September 27.
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