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Who doesn’t want to see Brad Pitt and George Clooney play off each other? Their grey stubbles, their slight crow’s-feet, their aching backs, their weakening eyesights, their car dashboards with painkillers? Wolfs is indeed an unapologetic vanity project for two of Hollywood’s most charming stars, who have woven movie magic together before. But, what’s vain is also in vain here.
Directed by Jon Watts, who earned his stripes with the Tom Holland-starring Superman films, Wolfs screams attention to itself, for something best enjoyed if you are not doing so – starting with that tweaked spelling of the title.
If you did try to join the dots, you would realise how dotty the plot is – starting with a district attorney who is in somewhat of a pickle, and racing straight onto drugs, Albanians, Chinatown, Croatians… you know, basically guys on whom any dirt will stick.
The reason you may not ask more of Wolfs, as it springs flimsy twists after twists into a stretched plot, is because you have George Clooney and Brad Pitt to look at. They don’t even have any names to distract us as they invoke a very Newman-Redford vibe.
The premise is that the aforesaid district attorney played by an under-used Amy Ryan calls Clooney (let’s call him Fixer No. 1) after a young boy she has taken up into a penthouse suite crashes into some glass and passes out. Just the kind of scandal that would end a politician’s career. Enter Fixer No. 1, who takes great trouble to emphasise how he’s the best there is at the job.
But just as he has literally got down his knees to start the clean-up, enters Fixer No. 2. in the shape of Pitt. It turns out that he has been hired by the hotel’s mystery owner, “who wants no scandal at my new, very exclusive establishment”.
These Fixers operate as lone wolf – the title, get it? So can the Nos. 1 and 2 work together? Especially when a whole lot of drugs enter the scene and the young man who has them in his backpack turns up not so dead.
While the actors are still in that hotel penthouse, the film holds promise, even in the way how George Clooney and Brad Pitt get onto each other’s nerves. Surely there has to be a fly in this soup, as there usually is when hotels harbouring politicians have secret cameras?
But no, the two with the young man in a car trunk are quickly up and about and racing about town to keep the story propelling forward.
Austin Abrams, who plays the young man, has to be given credit for almost stealing the scene from the two veterans. He is earnest and edgy, and as he prattles nervously, he of course helps the leather jacketed, growly and suspicious seniors see how they are “basically the same guy”.
Even if their growing affection for the young man is too obvious a plot device, both Clooney and Pitt know just how to infuse warmth into it. They also know – and we know that they know – that all this comes easy to them and that, at the end of the day, this movie is about the two playing themselves.
Still, if you have these two charmers and your longest scene is of Abrams running around town in undies – even if the Euphoria actor can streak, and make some very effective grunts – you have a problem. Apple perhaps knows this, which is why Wolfs had a very short theatrical run before ending on streaming.
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