Wolfs review | Two Hollywood stars, one two-star thriller

brad pitt and george clooney in 2024 thriller film wolfs
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Spider-Man: Homecoming director Jon Watts turns to the thriller genre with Wolfs, starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Our review:


It’d be fascinating to sit in a screening of Wolfs with Quentin Tarantino and Shane Black, just to see what they’d say about it. The inexplicably ugly title could be a vague reference to Mr Wolf, Harvey Keitel’s dapper ‘fixer’ from Tarantino’s 1993 zeitgeist-grabber, Pulp Fiction. Like just about all of Blackā€™s movies, Wolfs is also a buddy thriller with noir trappings ā€“ and it’s even set at Christmas.

Where Tarantino and Black made careers out of throwing contrasting characters into sticky situations, however, writer-director Jon Watts does something rather more experimental: he makes a thriller about two characters whose differences and flaws are barely discernible. Someone even comments on this in the film itself; “You guys wear the same clothes. You talk the same. You’re basically the same guy.”

It’s as though Watts’ subconscious was trying to tell him something.

To a studio executive, Wolfs sounds like a dream package: two Hollywood stars in George Clooney and Brad Pitt, a filmmaker who’s made one of the biggest movies of all time (Watts, whose Spider-Man: No Way Home raked in almost $2bn) and a script with an arresting premise.

It really is a decent premise, too. We open on a plush-looking New York penthouse suite, where the body of a young man, naked but for a pair of white briefs, lies face down on the floor, surrounded by broken glass. In the middle of the scene, spattered in blood and in a blind panic, stands middle-aged district attorney, Margaret (Amy Ryan). On the advice of a friend, she rings a phone number and engages the services of a nameless ‘fixer’ (Clooney), who calmly marches into the hotel room and sets about cleaning up the crime scene.

A few minutes later, however, a second fixer walks in, this one played by Brad Pitt. It turns out that the hotel’s owner has cameras illegally installed in all the rooms, and she’s sent in her own lone wolf (Pitt) to clean up the mess. At the unseen hotelier’s insistence, the two fixers (or ‘Wolfs’ if you must) have to work together to get rid of the body and any other evidence left lying around the place.

Pitt and Clooney, who previously appeared together in the Ocean’s movies and Burn After Reading, are both terrific actors in the right circumstances, but are given little to do here other than coast along on glib, A-list charm. The parts they play are of a similar age, have similar ailments (chronic back pain) and are both similarly competent at their jobs, so they’re left with little to do other than bicker over whose responsibility is whose. Their characters don’t so much leap off the screen as shuffle around in it, grumpily trading forgettable insults. It’s all a far cry from, say, Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang or The Nice Guys, in which their actor pairings were given sparky, distinguishable characters to inhabit ā€“ characters with actual arcs, who reveal more about themselves as their stories unfold.

Nor does Wolfs escalate in terms of tension like George Roy Hill’s buddy classic, Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, which Watts’ movie glancingly resembles at one stage. After the complications are established in its opening act, Wolfs spends the rest of its duration going nowhere in particular; a recognisable villain or threat is never properly established, and what initially feel like intriguing plot threads either aren’t addressed or are explained away in one of the film’s rambling exchanges.

From a technical standpoint, though, Wolfs looks like a proper bit of pulp cinema. Watts and cinematographer Larkin Seiple (who also shot Watts’ Cop Car) sumptuously capture Manhattan in the dead of winter, and their mix of smooth tracking shots and golden colour palette recall David Fincher’s post-Seven thrillers, including The Game and Gone Girl. There’s also a slow-motion vehicular set-piece where you can almost see the promise of a funnier, more eccentric genre film briefly emerge.

For the most part, though, Wolfs stubbornly refuses to come to life; it takes all the trappings of a classic thriller ā€“ a dead body, a pair of sharp-witted outlaws, corruption in high places ā€“ and somehow manages to make all of them seem dry and hackneyed.

If nothing else, Wolfs is proof that a movie can’t always survive on charisma alone.

Wolfs will stream on Apple TV+ from the 27th September 2024.

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