Clooney and Brad Pitt possess all the charisma of a pair of Sports Direct mugs in this Diplodocus-footed crime comedy about two rival underworld fixers who are forced to collaborate on the same messy job.
But in place of Black’s profane, pin-sharp repartee, and mazy plots with breakneck reversals, is a series of effortfully wacky crises, during which Clooney and Pitt keep repeating themselves and swearing where the funny dialogue should be.
Even the incident that gets things under way doesn’t remotely convince.
Amy Ryan plays New York City’s district attorney, and we’re invited to believe she has rented a US$10,000 ($16,022) hotel suite in New York for a one-night stand with an unkempt, gormless, not especially handsome student (Austin Abrams) she met in said hotel foyer half an hour beforehand. (Presumably Ryan’s character was originally male, until someone noticed there was only one female role – Poorna Jagannathan’s underworld medic, herself less human than plot device – in the entire film.)
Drugs are consumed, and the student slips and falls to the floor in his underwear; definitely unconscious, possibly dead. Her career flashing before her eyes, Ryan calls for Clooney – while the hotel’s surveillance-crazed manager (an off-screen Frances McDormand) notices help is required and sends in Pitt too.
George Clooney and Brad Pitt on the set of Wolfs in New York City last year. Photo / Getty Images
Both are stung to discover they’re not quite the lone wolf they thought – hence the title’s grammatical flub, one assumes.
So they grudgingly pool resources, first to get the youngster out of the hotel, and then to work out what to do with the four blocks of stolen cocaine they discover in his rucksack.
Clooney’s joints crack as he heaves the kid’s prone body around, and Pitt groans while bending over; later, while checking an address on a pager, both men reach for their reading glasses.
This is as close as Wolfs ever comes to a solid running gag, but it feels more like groundwork for a potentially sweet subplot about ageing that never materialises.
For two supposedly cold-blooded veterans of the clean-up game, you’d have to say Clooney and Pitt’s characters make a lot of unforced errors.
When their mission takes them to a wedding hosted by a mob boss (Zlatko Buric) who we’re told will have the pair assassinated as soon as he spots them, they decide the best way to avoid detection is to join in with the dancing. Every scene is rigged to facilitate this grumpy duo’s humiliation, but only rarely in ways that make sense.
Wolfs, which is an Apple TV+ production, carries itself as Hollywood entertainment like they used to make it – and if you think the wannabe Black stuff is insulting, just wait for the Butch and Sundance homage.
But it actually belongs to a very modern and depressing strain of cinema: the streaming platform work-creation scheme, in which famous names are slotted into lightweight action comedies in order to bring flesh-and-blood glamour to a digital brand.
Netflix has Red Notice, Heart of Stone and The Gray Man; Apple has Ghosted and now this.
Having suffered through all of these, I’m not entirely convinced they’re actually meant to be watched: rather, they’re the movie equivalent of an imposing row of books in a show home that turns out to be a cardboard box.
Wolfs is currently screening at the Venice Film Festival. On Apple TV+ from September 27.
