The movie presents itself as a sharp-toothed crime noir, hiding the good looks of its leading men in shadows as it shepherds us through a gorgeous, snowy New York night.
However, it plays outlike a quirky buddy comedy as the pair squabble through their attempts to dispose of a dead body while events increasingly go south.
Despite its serious looks, dead bodies, Class A drugs, violent shoot-outs and occasional meditations on growing old and feeling lonely, Wolfs is as fluffy as a merino sheep at the end of winter.
The film, which is streaming now on AppleTV+, has an easy-breezy charm as Clooney and Pitt banter and bicker while firing a barrage of playful put-downs and zippy zingers at each other.
It’s a fun, undemanding ride. But now and then it lurches awkwardly to a crawl as it moves outside of its easy-going comfort zone to try to match the depth of its cinematography.
Rather than enhancing the film with a layer of complexity, it undercuts the pacing and the spirit and just leaves you itching for it to hurry up and get on with things.
Clooney and Pitt play two solitary “cleaners” who are both called to the same job. They’re tasked with making the dead body of a young male prostitute disappear from a luxury hotel room. The District Attorney calls in Clooney, fearful that such a heinous scandal will end her career, while at the same time, the hotel’s shady owner sends in Pitt to avoid having her hotel dragged through the headlines.
Brad Pitt and George Clooney in Wolfs. Photo / Apple TV+
By professional necessity, both men work alone - you can’t remove all traces of a crime if there’s someone else who knows all about the crime and said trace removal. But when they’re presented with no other choice they reluctantly agree to work together to clean up the messy situation.
What follows is some jokey one-upmanship as the two men compete to prove who the better cleaner is while also trying to keep their best trade secret techniques hidden.
But things take a turn for the worse when they discover that the dead young man was carrying a backpack with four bricks of uncut heroin that some very unpleasant Albanian gangsters are going to want back.
Things only spiral downwards from there after the pair inadvertently interrupt a Croatian mob wedding and end up in an elongated chase sequence with a half-naked man through the streets of Manhattan.
With its embrace of idiosyncratic absurdity and stylised conversations, it can feel like the film was going for a Coen Brothers-lite vibe, especially with the casting of their regular collaborator Clooney and their one-time star Pitt. But while Wolfs makes an admirable attempt, it doesn’t quite pull it off.
Wolfs is a sheep in wolf’s clothing. Photo / Apple TV+
Having bounced off each other in a handful of similarly toned films over the last two decades - the jaunty Ocean’s 11 heist franchise, the Coens’ brilliant black comedy Burn After Reading - the two leads have a natural chemistry, with both exuding an effortless charisma.
Yes, they are playing to type, Clooney as the confident leader, Pitt, the sardonic observer, but hey, why not? It’d be a waste if they weren’t.
Such is the pair’s laid-back rapport it’s fun just to hang out with them. As their troubles escalate the comedy scales down in favour of action set-pieces.
These do have humorous touches - in particular a wildcard, laugh-out-loud, slow-mo sequence in its big chase scene - but the movie is at its best when it just lets Clooney and Pitt verbally go at it like the old sparring partners they are.
In buddy comedies, there’s the moment when the two opposites acknowledge their friendship. The big joke of Wolfs is that despite the fierce rivalry the two leads are essentially the same character, wearing near identical outfits, speaking with the same repetitive speech rhythms and even suffering from the same old age-induced back pain. It’s telling that neither character is named. So when the two lone wolfs learn the valuable lesson of friendship it feels more like an inevitability than an earned moment.
Even when going at it, they feel like two old buddies winding each other up for the lols.
Wolfs is a light breeze of a film hidden under a stylishly glossy outfit. It’s a fun crime jaunt that relies solely on the infectious charisma of its two stars. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
At the end of a long day, it’s an enjoyably easy and entertaining watch. But when you wake up the next morning, there won’t be any trace of it remaining.
Karl Puschmann is an entertainment columnist for the Herald. His fascination lies in finding out what drives and inspires creative people.
