Brad Pitt and George Clooney in Wolfs, premiering in theatres on Sept. 20 and globally on Apple TV+ on Sept. 27.Scott Garfield/Apple TV+
Wolfs
Written and directed by Jon Watts
Starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Amy Ryan
Classification N/A; 107 minutes
Opens in select theatres Sept. 20; streaming on Apple TV+ starting Sept. 27
How much or how little audiences get out of the new crime-world comedy Wolfs depends on their familiarity of and fondness for two semi-disparate elements of pop culture.
The first is the easy buddies-in-bad-times chemistry between George Clooney and Brad Pitt, first established in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven and finessed over two sequels and one Coen Bros. movie. The second is a little trickier to earmark, even though Wolfs points to the influence right in its title: the appearance of Harvey Keitel’s tuxedo-clad fixer Winston Wolf in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.
Popping up late in that film – well, technically early given Tarantino’s time-shifting screenplay structure – The Wolf is a one-man problem-solver extraordinaire, able to tidy the dirtiest load of underworld laundry with spic-and-span ease. The Wolf is so slick, and Keitel’s performance so charming, that it’s easy to see why writer-director Jon Watts practically lifted the character whole cloth for his new film. And then hit the multiplier button.
But more can often be less, as Wolfs reveals. Sure, there is a breezy allure in watching Clooney and Pitt play duelling fixers, each brought in to clean up a mess involving a district attorney (Amy Ryan), the young man (Austin Abrams) found near-death in her hotel suite, and four bricks of heroin belonging to one very angry drug lord. Yet once the half-clever set-up is established by Watts – what happens when two lone wolves must work together? – the film is content to merely coast on the charms of its stars.
That’s not such a big problem when you have Clooney and Pitt, both of whom still command the screen like few other leading men working today. But without, say, Soderbergh’s idiosyncratic visuals or Tarantino’s tongue-rolling dialogue, the two men can only nudge and wink their way through weak material for so long before the gig is up. Too quickly, Watts’s story slips from mildly interesting to extremely irritating, and there is no amount of gentle ribbing between various eras of People’s Sexiest Man Alive that can compensate for such narrative derivativeness. (Even trying to imagine the film as a semi-sequel to Clooney’s Michael Clayton, which focused on a more upper-crust fixer, doesn’t help.)
Watts, whose idea of taking a break from his trilogy of Spider-Man blockbusters involves working with the two biggest actors alive for the biggest company on the planet (that’d be Apple), can’t quite right-size his vision. Seemingly trying to get back to the street-level roots of his 2015 thriller Cop Car, the director gets tantalizingly close to nailing a compelling vision of the underworld. In his version of Manhattan after midnight, the city is a curiously deserted wasteland of snow-slicked streets, neon-lit Chinatown shops, and greasy roach motels in which everyone seems to be on the take. Yet the film’s shaggy plot constantly usurps any true sense of place and time, muddying the whole caper to a mish-mash of eccentricity.
By the time Clooney and Pitt finally make headway in the case of the boy and the heroin – if that sounds like the title of a Hayao Miyazaki film, we should only be so lucky – I couldn’t help but be reminded of The Wolf’s directive back in Pulp Fiction: “If I’m curt with you it’s because time is a factor. I think fast, I talk fast and I need you guys to act fast if you wanna get out of this.” If only Watts had taken such advice to heart.