WOLFS Review: Clooney and Pitt Renew Their Onscreen Bromance in Breezy, Disposable Action-Comedy

Closer to the end of their feted, award-winning careers than the beginning, George Clooney and Brad Pitt, longtime, if not lifelong, friends, Oscar winners (Syriana and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood …, respectively), reunite once again for writer-director Jon Watts’ (the recent Spider-Man trilogy, Cop Car) first post-MCU effort, Wolfs.

A risk-averse, laidback, low-effort action-comedy, Wolfs isn’t likely to rank high on Clooney and Pitt’s not-quite-imminent career retrospectives at a future Oscar ceremony, but more often than not, it passes the time-wasting diversion test. Sometimes Wolfs even qualifies as put-down-your-cellphone-and-pay-attention entertaining, coasting as it does on Clooney and Pitt’s well-worn onscreen chemistry to patch the holes in Watts’ formulaic, convention-ridden screenplay.

When we first meet Clooney’s stubbornly unnamed character (Cleaner 1 for this review), he’s been called to clean up an unexpected mess. A high-profile, “hard on crime” district attorney, Margaret (Amy Ryan), finds herself with a presumably dead, college-age, friend-with-benefits, Kid (Austin Abrams), at a swanky, $10K/night, uptown hotel, blood on her clothes, and a potentially career-ending scandal if the Kid’s body — and everything associated with the Kid — doesn’t disappear before the night turns into morning and the morning into the next day.

As a professional fixer in a Tarantino-inspired world, Cleaner 1 knows exactly what to do, when to do it, and almost as importantly what to bring, including a fresh change of clothes for Margaret, plastic garbage bags, and duct tape, to the meet-and-greet. He doesn’t, however, count on the sudden appearance of another unnamed fixer, Cleaner 2 (Pitt), vigorously knocking on the hotel room door, letting himself in when no one responds right away, and announcing his arrival to a slightly stunned Margaret as the solution to her corpse problem.

Sent by the hotel’s justifiably paranoid management, Cleaner 2 does everything Cleaner 1 does, right down to the tools of the fixer trade he brings with him, the dark, inconspicuous clothes he wears, and the I-work-alone, lone-wolf attitude (hence the title) presumably typical of those in their criminal underworld-adjacent profession.

Watts predictably mines the friction between the two cleaners for not infrequent, though decidedly modest laughs, depending first (and last) on Clooney and Pitt’s easygoing charms, increasingly frustrated line deliveries, and their respective comic timing. It’s an initial, but by no means last, reminder that time might not be on their side (they’re both noticeably grayer and slower physically and mentally). Their movie-star charisma (individually and collectively), however, remains worth the price of admission or a streaming rental.

As a long-forgotten, nighttime TV ad would blare, “Wait, there’s more.” There’s always more, at least until the end credits roll. The “more” in this case involves the Kid, injured badly in a fall, but far from dead, June (Poorna Jagannathan), a not-quite off-the-grid doctor with fixers as her clientele, and a backpack (the Kid’s) crammed with illicit drugs valued somewhere near a quarter of a million dollars.

As story-based complications go, it’s not totally unexpected for an old-school star vehicle of this kind, but by giving Clooney and Pitt’s characters a new task (i.e., returning the drugs to their rightful owner, keeping the Kid alive until they do, and surviving the night intact), it slowly drains the comedy side out of the action-comedy equation until there’s almost no comedy at all.

The obligatory set pieces that follow the Kid’s transition from prop to character, including one inside a crowded wedding reception hall/disco and a later action sequence that unfolds outside a chilly, snow-covered warehouse, fall noticeably short of the imagination, inventiveness, or novelty that characterized Watts’ work on the Spider-Man trilogy or even his indie feature-length debut, Cop Car, likely a result of a mid-level budget (Clooney, Pitt, and Watts’ much-discussed salaries aside) and the subsequent semi-rushed production schedule. Only a mid-film set piece involving the Kid’s ill-fated escape attempt passes the memorable test, but it also raises expectations the rest of Wolfs fails to meet.

Wolfs is now streaming exclusively on AppleTV+.