George Clooney and Brad Pitt star in ‘genially watchable but forgettable’ crime caper

Ocean’s Eleven stars Clooney and Pitt reunite as underworld fixers who have more in common than they’d like to admit – the result is a laidback bromantic comedy which lacks spark.

Fancy hanging out with George Clooney and Brad Pitt as they tease each other about how old they’re getting, while still looking cooler than a pair of cucumbers? If so, then Wolfs could be the film for you. Written and directed by Jon Watts, the director of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man trilogy, this laidback crime caper doesn’t have a great deal more to offer, but there is something to be said for seeing the pals from Ocean’s Eleven on the same screen again.

Clooney plays an underworld fixer, a mysterious man in black who specialises in making problems disappear, so he’s just the person required when a tough-on-crime district attorney (Amy Ryan) has a bad night in a swanky New York hotel suite. She had picked up a much younger man (Austin Abrams) in the bar downstairs, but he hadn’t been in her bed for long when he jumped off it, bumped his head, and seemingly died. One phone call later, Clooney is on the case. “There’s nobody who can do what I do,” he boasts, at which point Pitt walks in and makes the very same claim.

It turns out that there has been a double-booking, and these two lone wolves have to work together, much to their irritation. To make matters more galling for both of them, they discover that the young man they’re supposed to dispose of is (a) in possession of a backpack crammed with stolen drugs, and (b) still alive. The fixers have to drive around the city and find whoever the drugs belong to, but they might not stop bickering long enough to get anywhere.

A throwback to the days when Hollywood stars didn’t all play superheroes, and could be spotted in bromantic comedy thrillers instead, Wolfs is reminiscent of Midnight Run and 48 Hrs. The difference is that those 1980s hits got their energy from the clashing personalities of their leading men, whereas the joke in Watts’ film is that Clooney and Pitt are more similar than they would like to admit. “You’ve got the same clothes, you talk the same, you’re basically the same guy,” marvels the young man in their care. This makes for an endearing and amusing dynamic, especially when the grey-bearded 60-somethings (yes, you read that correctly) realise that they both have bad backs and they both need reading glasses. But there isn’t enough friction to get any sparks flying. Wolfs made its debut on Sunday at the Venice Film Festival, but it will be on Apple+ by the end of the month, and it’s the kind of genially watchable yet forgettable time-passer that streaming services were made for.

The trouble is that its two handsome heroes are sheep in wolves’ clothing – or wolfs’ clothing, even. Pitt is the cheekier of the two, and Clooney is the grumpier, but they’re both terse, reserved dudes who walk and talk slowly, and even their sparring is limited to muttered insults and minor disagreements. Deadpool & Wolverine, they ain’t. Just to add to the easy-going feel, the plot is several twists and revelations short of what this sort of nocturnal odyssey needs. There is some vague, hackneyed stuff about Albanian gangsters, but there is so little story to fit into the film that Watts is happy to let it amble gently along.

This languorous approach to the plot is puzzling, because Wolfs leaves countless questions unanswered concerning the district attorney, the drug dealers, the hotel’s owner, and the fixers’ shady middle-men. For that matter, it leaves countless questions unanswered about the fixers themselves, who are as lightly sketched at the film’s abrupt ending as they are at its beginning. Perhaps Watts thought that Clooney and Pitt’s chemistry would be so sparkling that nobody would care about the story. Or perhaps he decided to hold back some information for a potential sequel. Well, fair enough, but if he does get to make Wolfs 2, he should try to give it more bite.