For most of its history, Hollywood made its money by putting stars the public liked to watch in stories that wouldn’t be worth watching without them. These days, such star-driven films are falling out of fashion — except on our streamers.
That’s where you’ll find Wolfs, an AppleTV+ vehicle that features George Clooney and Brad Pitt skating through a crime plot in glamorously grizzled mode. They play two professional "fixers" — they’ll do anything to clean up a client’s mess — who collide while working the same job. Written and directed by Jon Watts (who did a popular Spider-Man reboot), Wolfs matters more for its stars than for the characters they play.
The action begins when a New York politico played by Amy Ryan has a casual fling at a posh hotel that goes terribly wrong. She calls Clooney, a seasoned pro who knows how to make trouble disappear. He’s doing just that when they’re interrupted. Enter Pitt who, as it turns out, is working for the hotel, which also wants the problem to go away. Because Clooney and Pitt (their characters don’t use names) always work alone, both bristle at each other’s presence.
The two bicker and gibe and question each other’s expertise — Pitt keeps hinting that Clooney’s an old man. And naturally, they discover that their task is more challenging than it looked.
All too soon they’re dealing with four bricks of stolen drugs, a goofy college kid and a group of murderous gangsters. Over the course of a long night the two come to a kind of understanding — not only with one another, but about their larger role in the world.
If I’d paid to see Wolfs in a theater rather than screened it on TV — which has the lowered expectations of in-flight viewing — I’d probably have been bugged by its lack of imagination and urgency. Watts’ script gives you no singing dialogue a la Elmore Leonard or Quentin Tarantino, none of the stinging emotional force you find in comparable two-hander stories — Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, say, or Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges.
And yet the movie’s still enjoyable. Clooney and Pitt are such deft, charismatic actors that, even in a lazy, low-key picture like this one, you get a lot of pleasure from their barbed asides and mocking silences. It’s clear why they’ve been stars for three decades.
Thirty years ago, one would have wagered that Clooney, a smart man with a wide-ranging mind, would wind up with the weightier resume of the two. And indeed, he’s been in lots of terrific movies, like Out of Sight, Up in the Air and his work with the Coen Brothers. Yet just as he’s drawn to the idea of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack — he has one of his own — he often throws himself into projects that feel like throwbacks to the 1950s or ‘60s. He’s an old-fashioned kind of star. And while a lot of his movies are fun — think Ocean’s Eleven — they rarely resonate in the culture as much as he does off the screen.
For all his prettiness and ubiquity in the tabloids, Pitt’s movies do. Maybe because he’s always been running away from his beauty — he’s never happier than when scruffed up — he’s chosen a more adventurous path. From Thelma & Louise and Se7en, to Fight Club and The Tree of Life, to 12 Years a Slave and Moneyball and Once Upon a Time in ... Hollywood, he’s made movies that feel in touch with our present moment.
What Clooney and Pitt share, beyond friendship, is that both achieved stardom by doing the kind of movies that rarely get made anymore. That’s why, even though Wolfs is slight, I can see how they might find it meaningful.
After all, this is a story about two old pros who each start out thinking he’s irreplaceable — the only one who can do this special job. Then each discovers that, far from being unique, there’s somebody else who does exactly what they do. And so far from being indispensable, they’re working for soulless people who have no qualms about getting rid of them and hiring somebody new. Which is to say, Wolfs isn’t really a film about being a fixer. It’s a film about being an aging movie star.
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