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    • George Clooney-Brad Pitt hijacker criminally bad
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    George Clooney-Brad Pitt hijacker criminally bad

    Vaseline Posted on

    Wolfs is in theaters from Friday, September 20th and can be seen on Apple TV+ from Friday, September 27th. This review is based on a screening at the 81st Venice International Film Festival.

    Jon Watts’ crime comedy Wolfs straddles the line between humor and meaning without fully creating either. It spotlights the charming talents of Brad Pitt and George Clooney, but rests on its laurels, giving them half-baked material that they haven’t even scratched the surface of. Ocean chemistry. The film is innocent at first glance – the editing seems largely competent – ​​but makes all the wrong aesthetic decisions for a bouncy, farcical film about two criminal “cleaners” forced into the same job.

    When a middle-aged New York City district attorney (Amy Ryan) finds herself in a posh hotel room with a dead, bloody, half-naked twentysomething, she panics, but has the good sense to call an unlisted number she’s been given for just such a scandalous occasion. Clooney—slick as ever in a black leather jacket, but with an aching old back—shows up and begins to erase all traces of the incident. But in an unexpected twist, Pitt’s identically dressed fixer also shows up, working for the hotel’s mysterious owners, with the same mission in mind.

    Clooney and Pitt’s character would rather work alone, but their loyalties to the DA and the hotel force them into a reluctant partnership. These early scenes of them grilling each other and trying to figure out how to proceed—i.e., figuring out the film’s central premise—are a nice introduction that gradually builds intrigue, eventually sending the unlikely duo on a broader mission to track down the owner of a cocaine stash they find during their assignment. The problems that hold Wolf back arise early and often from that point on.

    First, there’s never any sense of contrast between the two leads. They’re both sly, fast-talking criminal guards who like to get things done quickly, but they have the same brand of banter and ego in every scene (not unlike Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham, whose comedic exchanges in Hobbs and Shaw turned out to be very repetitive). Second, the presentation feels out of place. In 2015, Watts directed the compelling 2 crime indie Cop Car; in the decade prior to Wolfs, he had made only Spin–Man Moviesand hasn’t had much of a chance to use lighting as a storytelling tool as he did in his breakthrough thriller. With the help of Cop Car cinematographer Larkin Seiple, he creates pools of light and darkness in every space in Wolfs, with a warm, high-contrast palette reminiscent of a classic mafia film.

    Unfortunately, this works against everything the film is trying to do. Wolfs is not an intense affair, and casting it in the mold of a crime thriller creates an eerie effect. Where Watts seems to want to tell stories through visual obscuration, he probably would have benefited from letting us see every inch of Clooney and Pitt’s facial expressions at all times, rather than hiding them (and their well-established comedic gifts) in somber shadows. It’s technically beautiful and “cinematic,” but completely wrong for this kind of antics.

    Watts’ influence on crime dramas doesn’t stop there. While the film’s title immediately conjures up thoughts of “lone wolves,” it simultaneously reads as an homage to Harvey Keitel’s character in Pulp Fiction: Winston Wolfe, who specializes in disposing of bodies and evidence. (For a more recent example of this archetype, see David Patrick Kelly in John Wick). These are the kinds of characters who add color and personality to crime films by uncovering and spinning yarns from the hidden threads that make up the fabric of their fictional underworlds. (Again, see the John Wick franchise.) Centering them in their own stories is certainly not unworkable, but it imposes demands that Watts seems unwilling or unable to meet. The world inhabited by Clooney and Pitt’s fixers feels small, almost infinitesimal. Few other characters exist within its confines, and even fewer hint at anything interesting offscreen; Poorna Jagannathan’s criminal doctor June appears too briefly, and offers too little idiosyncrasy, to fill this role. A few early moments certainly lend to the environmental narrative—campaign posters featuring Amy Ryan’s face, for example—but Wolf’s environments rarely feel more exciting or special than whatever Manhattan street corner the producers had permission to block off on any given day.

    Few 108-minute films feel so endless

    Without going into too much detail, a second, younger character joins the duo’s sleuthing, affording Clooney a handful of dramatic moments as his character ruminates on the isolating nature of the job. This theoretically injects the film with the question of whether the two men will get along (or allow themselves to), but it never fleshes out the emotional contours of Clooney’s character—let alone Pitt’s, who’s merely a vehicle for all things “cool”—resulting in a story lacking any real dramatic weight. That his character is supposedly lonely is something said, rather than inferred, experienced, or seen.

    This would have been forgivable if the film had managed to twist its comedic screws, but it plays a single note throughout. The two leads bicker by repeating words in successive sentences—”Are you the person?” “I’m not the person!” “Where is the person?!”—giving Wolfs the feel of a slick student film about a rich teenager subsisting on a media diet of early Guy RitchieWorse yet, Watts’ script calls attention to the repetitive nature of the dialogue in a failed attempt to make light of its flaws. The characters even call a plot development “lazy nonsense” before deciding that the logistics don’t matter, as if Watts had written his second draft in Death Pole pajamas.

    The longer Wolf goes on (and man, it does; few 108-minute movies feel so interminable), the more insulting it becomes to watch. Granted, it deserves its day in theaters, but Apple to withdraw in theatrical release in favor of streaming will ensure that far fewer customers will be unhappy about having to pay for a ticket to a film that barely tries. How to squeeze a sequel out of this is anyone’s guess—and ultimately Watts’ problem. Maybe he has the number of a man who can help fix it.

    Vaseline
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