A one-joke movie featuring two big-name stars, Wolfs casts George Clooney and Brad Pitt—billed alphabetically, as one does with Oscar-winning actors of equal celebrity and stature—as fixers who converge simultaneously on a delicate situation involving a hotel room, a body, and a cache of stolen heroin.
Jack (Clooney) is an off-the-books problem-solver who takes pride in being so exclusive that he can be reached only at an unlisted number known to exactly one other person; his stoic demeanor during an anguished call from a rattled civilian named Margaret (Amy Ryan)—who’s pretty sure that her much younger lover has been killed after an accidental fall through a glass table—belies his pride in a job he already knows will be well done. “I was told that you’re the only man who can do what you do,” Margaret whispers to Jack, moments before Nick (Pitt) comes knocking at the door, boasting an identical set of skills and a similarly smug attitude about his own prowess. He also seemingly has a higher pay grade: He answers to the hotel owner (voiced by Frances McDormand), who’s got powerful friends and is none too eager to have her five-star establishment publicly sullied as a crime scene.
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There are, surely, worse ideas for a movie than “What if George Clooney and Brad Pitt wore nice suits and talked shit to each other?” and Wolfs wastes no time in establishing itself as a territorial pissing contest between elegantly grizzled alphas. Jon Watts’s film isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel as much as give it a little bit of glossy topspin. Everything is relatively well constructed, from the snow-dusted, monochromatic vision of New York to a cleverly curated soundtrack of vintage pop hits that narrate the barely veiled subtexts of nostalgia and narcissism one needle drop at a time: “Smooth Operator,” followed by “Mr. Vain” and, inevitably, “Just the Two of Us.”
On one level, Wolfs is clearly coasting on our cozy collective memories of Pitt and Clooney’s dudes-rock glory days as Rusty Ryan and Danny Ocean, not to mention their brief but priceless dynamic of mutual antagonism in Burn After Reading, which channeled all the ambient, bromantic energy of the Ocean’s films into a hilarious, mock-pornographic money-shot-slash-headshot. Drill down a bit deeper through the densely layered strata of Wolfs’ self-satisfaction, however, and the tone is a bit more melancholy—less a case of sexagenarian muscle flexing than a bittersweet rumination on an entire Hollywood cohort’s encroaching obsolescence. Presenting, For Your Consideration, the Gen X Butch and Sundance: Let’s try to enjoy them while we still have the chance.
It should be said that Clooney and Pitt are not the only viable candidates for the title of the Last Great American Movie Star. There’s also Tom Cruise, who mined a similar vein of pathos in Top Gun: Maverick without even slightly creasing his eerie Dorian Gray visage—not to mention Leonardo DiCaprio, Denzel Washington, and, out slightly further toward left field, Nicolas Cage. But the duo’s notoriety as a double act—and the extratextual fact of their real-lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous friendship, which makes for good pull quotes and photo spreads in GQ—gives Wolfs a solid internal logic as a pop cultural fable in which a pair of experienced, endearingly cynical Gen X A-listers comes to the rescue of a callow but hapless Zoomer. The latter is an unnamed, in-over-his-head teenager played by Austin Abrams, whose arc takes him from being a-not-quite-dead body in need of disposal to a very-much-alive-and-kicking liability; no prizes for guessing that, as the film goes on and the plot thickens (and eventually congeals), Jack and Nick learn to like their skittish little buddy, not to mention each other, and duly join forces to keep the kid safe amid the requisite pileup of goofy, expendable drug cartel henchmen.
Lest such an interpretation seem like overreaching, consider that in a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Watts—who at least seems chuffed to be on furlough from his day job managing the Spider-Man franchise—explained that he shaped Wolfs’ screenplay specifically with the two actors in mind. “It felt so much easier to be writing in the voice of Brad Pitt and in the voice of George Clooney because I know that voice,” said the director. “You get to draw on everything that they’ve ever done, and it’s like a shorthand.” In fairness, it’s hard not to feel sympathy—or even solidarity—with Watts’s desire to cast off the solid-gold shackles of his Marvel gig. The 43-year-old former music video director and Onion News Network contributor is surely the most unprepossessing filmmaker with lifetime global box office grosses in the low billions, and stripping down to a self-contained genre piece closer in scale and spirit to his 2015 breakthrough, Cop Car—an entertaining enough B-movie riff about a pair of teenaged joyriders tangling with a corrupt sheriff—is a nice idea in theory. Watts is a perfectly decent filmmaker, but a movie that’s been scripted almost entirely in shorthand can’t help but feel perfunctory, so much so that after an hour or so of smarmy one-liners and sarcastic, sotto voce asides, Pitt and Clooney’s double-barreled charm offensive doesn’t just sputter, but mutate into its own sort of alienation effect.
The issue may be that Clooney and Pitt are too inside their respective wheelhouses. Because Wolfs begins with Jack being first on the scene—and emphasizes his nagging feelings of insecurity following Nick’s arrival—there is an angle from which it can be seen as his story, and Clooney is ideally suited to the part of a seasoned pro worried he’s losing his fastball. It’s an archetype he played to perfection in Michael Clayton, which—with apologies to the Coens—remains the actor’s best screen performance, or at least his most resourceful. He can’t work the same magic here because Jack’s status as a walking cliché isn’t tied to a believable psychology of self-loathing or robust dramaturgy. In lieu of offering any kind of detailed portraiture, Clooney barely manages to fill in the blanks. As for Pitt, who’s always at his funniest and most menacing when acting in some degree of counterpoint to the action (see: Fight Club, Killing Them Softly, and especially Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood), he seems weirdly noncommittal despite a role that’s tailor-made for his gifts. The flatness in his acting delineates the difference between a talented actor playing a heartless character and a talented actor simply not putting his own heart into it.
That there’s not much to say about Wolfs beyond the problem of its own sleekly engineered torpor is unfortunate: It’s a custom-tooled star vehicle that’s stuck in neutral. To return to the idea of George and Brad as Butch and Sundance (and, by extension, modern analogues to Paul Newman and Robert Redford), the closing sequence highlights the strange, unpalatable mix of glibness and sentimentality at the core of the material. In Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the fact that the heroes ultimately don’t get to ride off into the sunset is played effectively for pathos, culminating in director George Roy Hill’s decision to freeze-frame our heroes before the fatal hail of gunfire—a gentler fate than the ones bestowed on the outlaw duos in contemporaneous classics like Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde. Those three movies were cultural signposts suggesting a changing of the Hollywood guard, and for audiences at the time it felt like something was at stake in the paradigm shift. Not only does it seem unlikely—or even absurd—to think that Wolfs will retrospectively signify something similar about its own era, but it’s ultimately so vague and vaporous that it melts on contact. It’s the sort of movie you start forgetting even while you’re still watching it.
Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.