Wolfs: Pitt and Clooney’s laboured, low-effort crime caper

It’s hard to think of much that’s more dispiriting in Hollywood cinema right now, than the sight of a once-mighty star partnership running on the fumes of prior glories and reducing their previously buoyant on-and off-screen chemistry to the status of a laboured schtick. But then, writer-director Jon Watts’ Wolfs, starring Brad Pitt and George Clooney as a pair of professional fixers assigned to the same messy gig, is an action-comedy caper so infectiously low-effort that after watching it, it’s hard to think of anything at all. 

Pitt and Clooney, their characters unnamed perhaps so as not to distract from the fact that we’re watching Brad Pitt and George Clooney, play two ruthlessly amoral professionals who each believe that in terms of cleaning up after the rich and powerful, “nobody does what I do.” This misapprehension ends with a night of extracurricular shenanigans involving the New York DA (a game Amy Ryan) and the accidental death of her hotel bar hook-up. She calls in Clooney. The hotel manager (Frances McDormand, of all the actresses to reduce to a voice on the phone) who has been illegally surveilling her own establishment, calls in Pitt. Ageing lone wolf, meet very marginally less ageing other lone wolf. 

With the bickering bagmen forced to work together, the convolutions begin when a stash of drugs is found at the scene, and convolute even more when the dead kid (Austin Abrams) turns out not to be quite so dead, leaps from the boot of the getaway car and leads them, gibbering in his Y-fronts, on a merry chase across Manhattan. A visit to a comely Chinatown doctor (Poorna Jagannathan) ensues, followed by a bunch of other poorly explained red herrings that somehow involve an Albanian druglord and a cadre of Croatian thugs at a wedding — rather random villain nationalities, chosen as though Watts is determined to risk insult only to those European nations with smaller populations. It’s surprising the Sammarinese or Liechtensteiner mafias are not somehow involved. Anyway, could it be that this whole palaver goes right to the top, and maybe the only way for the trio to get through it all is for Pitt and Clooney’s characters to become the besties they were always destined to be? It could!

As though written by an AI whose entire data set was exclusively Shane Black scripts, Wolfs rips off the formula in so many ways (tortuous plot involving elite corruption; buddy dynamic; naif who inspires the lead duo’s dormant protective instincts; even a goddamn Christmastime setting) that it becomes even more glaring all the ways this is obviously not by Shane Black. For one thing, the mismatched-co-star trope which gave us the inspired pairings in Lethal Weapon (1987), The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) and The Nice Guys (2016) can’t get off the ground when the co-stars are so clearly not mismatched, having appeared before together in the Oceans movies, not to mention in a hundred tabloid fluff pieces about their real-life bromance back in the pranking and pot-bellied-pig-owning days. It’s hardly surprising, nor even particularly satisfying, to witness the thawing of an animosity that was never convincingly frosty in the first place.

For another thing, in place of Black’s trademark profane, snappy dialogue we get a lot of exhausted exchanges that move to the same rhythms but don’t contain any of the jokes, so the wisecracks crack emptily, like fortune cookies containing no fortune. Instead of bouncy banter we get interminable repetitions of the same line back and forth, with different inflections, as though we’re watching some ungodly riff on the Abbott & Costello “Who’s on First?” sketch, minus the actual wordplay. 

At a generous count the Pitt/Clooney camaraderie yields two funny moments, one involving a novel corpse-retrieval method using a hotel luggage trolley, and the other a cute little bit where one forces the other to show actual concern by faking a grievous wound. Quite what attracted these two A-listers to a project with such a low hit rate remains a mystery though their reported 35m-dollar-apiece fees might have had something to do with it (Clooney denied the amount, but the NYT has drily doubled down on its reporting.) However it came about, as yet another placeholder gag about bad backs and failing eyesight creaks between the pair, and in the firm belief that both men, as genuine-article actors and producers, are so much better than this cynically recycled knock-off, it’s hard to shake the feeling that perhaps, to quote Shane Black as baldly as Wolfs does, we’re all just getting too old for this shit. 

► Wolfs is in UK cinemas 20 September.