September 30, 2024 · Watch the official trailer
Bringing together two of the world’s last great movie stars and not putting them on the big screen feels hollow and almost somewhat pointless.
With dynamic chemistry thanks to their great friendship, George Clooney and Brad Pitt have appeared several times on screen together and teaming the duo in a darker comedy about rival fixers forced to work in tandem to clean a murder scene feels like a ripe premise for compelling storytelling and an easy $100 million at the box office.
Yet writer/director Jon Watts’ film “Wolfs” lost almost all momentum after its trailer debuted this summer, causing Apple to nearly wipe it off the theatrical release calendar altogether before sliding it onto its AppleTV+ service this past weekend to moderate fanfare.
It’s the first underwhelming launch of a movie starring either of these Oscar award-winning actors since the COVID-19 pandemic ruined Clooney’s 2022 rom-com “Ticket To Paradise” with Julia Roberts from a lengthy theatrical release.
Despite its middling shift out of cinemas onto the small screen, “Wolfs” does feature two all-time greats exuding and brooding with a natural repartee that keeps the film from being a complete disaster and gives just enough energy and comedy to keep audiences’ waning interest in the subpar screenplay.
“Wolfs” finds Clooney and Pitt as fixers each brought in separately to a high-rise hotel where a district attorney played by Amy Ryan has found herself alone with a dead younger man in her bedroom. Circumstances force the conflicted rivals to work together to make the problem go away as quickly and quietly as possible with increasingly bizarre situations getting in the way.
Clooney delivers a performance that’s a touch more cartoonish of the two leads with an affable look on his face that constantly finds his character questioning why things are happening with just a subtle tinge of ineptitude that helps set a counterbalance with Pitt’s more demure, standoffish character.
Watts intentionally leaves both characters nameless to drive home how mysterious each is to each other and the world around them with the goal of heightening tension and the unexpected nature of the film’s plot. While this does not always work in the ways Watts intends, the vagueness of the character backgrounds allow for Clooney and Pitt to mimic each other in such fun, interesting ways that there’s a bit of meta, self-referencial, and at times, outright humorous comedy at play.
Pitt, for his part, seems to revel in the opportunities to jab at Clooney’s character from a distance, as if he’s simply waiting for a chance to step in and make Clooney look and feel the fool. The charm in which he is able to radiate off the screen while simply enjoying a soda has that innate suavity that only Pitt can bring to a role so effortlessly.
Simply put, a film as simplistic and sophomoric as “Wolfs” shouldn’t have talents the caliber of Clooney and Pitt headlining the movie, but yet it somehow works.
Watts, better known for his work in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with their Tom Holland-led “Spider-Man” films, has a clear idea for the tone in which he wants his film to look and feel, though the visual and emotional balances he’s striving for don’t have the same swagger and gravitas that the actors do, which leads to a largely disappointing result.
Apple Studios has gone through a recent string of near-successes that fall flat when getting close to their theatrical debuts with “Wolfs” coming close on the heels of the Matt Damon-Casey Affleck buddy comedy “The Instigators,” which is a significantly worse film overall than “Wolfs.”
For as much as audiences may want to see Clooney and Pitt together on screen again and again, the project quality probably needs to be significantly improved over “Wolfs” despite how easy a casual watch the Apple streamer movie ultimately is.
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