Controversial Point: George Clooney and Brad Pitt Are Good Together

This review was originally published on September 1, 2024, out of the Venice Film Festival. Wolfs is now streaming on Apple TV+.

George Clooney and Brad Pitt made for exuberant entertainment in the 2000s, and then gave us nothing together for the next 16 years. For this, I mostly blame Clooney, who’s spent the better part of that period on the run from his own effortless movie stardom toward a career directing earnest, unexciting films. Clooney is so adept at turning on the charm that he seems lightly embarrassed by the whole deal, as if it’s all too easy, but when you watch something like Wolfs you appreciate how rare his charisma is. Wolfs, which comes from Spider-Man: No Way Home’s Jon Watts, isn’t exceptional as comedies go — certainly nowhere near as cutting as the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading or as effervescent as the Ocean’s trilogy (may it continue looping on cable forever). But it is an unabashed platform for basking in the rapport of its two leading men, who are in familiar and fine form as a pair of hypercompetent cleaners, and that makes it a consistently enjoyable watch even when the pacing gets a little slack.

The characters that Clooney and Pitt play in Wolfs aren’t named. Clooney’s credited as “Margaret’s Man” and Pitt as “Pam’s Man” in a reference to the women who hire each of them, but neither of them actually belong to anyone. They operate alone, freelance fixers for hire who show up to solve problems for the powerful and connected. On the night in question, that means a District Attorney, Margaret (Amy Ryan), who finds herself in a ruinous situation with the body of a twentysomething in a $10,000 hotel suite, and Pam (Frances McDormand, another Burn After Reading alum, in an off-screen role), who owns that hotel. When the two men find themselves double booked to cover up what Margaret swears was an accidental death, they begrudgingly try to work together. When the body turns out to be accompanied by a backpack full of heroin, and also turns out to belong to a hapless kid (Austin Abrams) who isn’t actually dead after all, the unhappy pair of professionals realize they’re in for a long night in a snowy New York City around the holidays.

The film’s title is a reference to lone wolves, but it also brings to mind Winston Wolfe (Harvey Keitel), the no-nonsense cleaner in Pulp Fiction. Neither of the guys in Wolfs come close to summoning Winston’s tuxedoed zest for life, though. They live for their jobs, taking such professional pride in their work that each resents the other seeing the little tricks of the trade they’ve perfected over the years. There isn’t as much pop culture lore built up about the idea of fixers as there is about, say, assassins, and aside from a mentioned expectation of solitary monasticism, the film doesn’t have quite enough to riff on to sustain itself in its last act, when we’re expected to believe that the merest hint that the two men are acquainted in some way would be cause for one of their former clients to kill them both. But the bickering the pair do at the beginning, when they meet for the first time in that blood-soaked hotel room and soon find themselves arguing over body disposal technique, their division of labor, and who has the best backroom physician — that’s so very good.

Watts made the calling card indies Clown (2014) and Cop Car (2015) before getting scooped up by Marvel to direct Sony’s three Tom Holland Spider-Man movies. That those were some of the most successful blockbusters of the past decade says nothing about Watts’ filmmaking sensibility beyond his ability to shepherd movies through a complicated corporate mindfield. Wolfs doesn’t offer much more on that front, either, aside from the fact that Watts likes a lot of the right stuff, like, as cited in his own director’s statement, David Mamet, and Buster Keaton, who inspired a nice bit of slow-motion slapstick involving an unintended car collision in the middle of a chase. It’s a sign of how franchise-warped Hollywood has gotten that this action comedy starring two of the industry’s biggest stars is framed as a “one for me” project, but it doesn’t actually feel like a release of all the creative impulses Watts had to tamp down over years in the superhero trenches.

It feels adequate, never propulsive or clever enough, but exactly the kind of material that Clooney and Pitt know how to sell with their expert timing, their wordless exchanges of eloquent eye contact as the action heats up, and the expected but inarguable pleasure that comes from their characters starting to like and respect one another over the course of the slushy evening. They’re playing rival coworkers who’ve been secretly dying to talk shop with someone else in their field for years, and they slowly realize that they’ve finally been given that opportunity in between stops involving a Chinatown doctor, Albanian gangsters, and a Croatian mob wedding. Clooney and Pitt played heist besties in the Ocean’s movies, and they slip into some of those rhythms again, Pitt the wise-ass who likes to offer sardonic commentary from the sidelines, Clooney the would-be mastermind trying to game out the bigger picture. It’s good to see them together, especially as recurring bits about reading glasses and sore backs provide the reminder that neither is as spry as they used to be. We shouldn’t have to wait another 16 years.