Wolfs Is A Proof That Clooney & Pitt Are No Affleck & Damon

It’s hard to go wrong with the sheer celebrityhood of Clooney and Pitt in one frame, but <em>Wolfs</em> plays it too safe. Despite an intriguing start, it sort of collapses into a barrel of genre cliches.

Rahul+Desai

Sep 28, 2024

Still from Apple TV+'s Wolfs. YouTube screengrab

FOR FANS OF the Ocean’s film trilogy, Wolfs is little more than lazy Danny-and-Rusty fanfiction. This film brings back George Clooney and Brad Pitt in their typically smug bromantic avatars – where they’re middle-aged and cranky, snarky and slick, finishing each other’s expressions and thoughts and sentences like men who know that they’re hunky but pretend to play it down. The in-joke is that they’ve even started to resemble one another. The in-joke is also that they play strangers – each a lone wolf – forced to team up for a job gone wrong. The word ‘Wolfs’ alludes to just that: Here are two loners who’re so much in denial of their sibling-lover energy that everything – including a muddled plot and a grammatically incorrect title – conspires to unite them. They are meant to be. It would be poignant if the rest of it weren’t so unoriginal.

They have no names, so let’s just call them Danny (Clooney) and Rusty (Pitt). Danny is a professional fixer who’s called in to ‘clean up’ a hotel-room situation (a popular District Attorney finds herself with the dead body of a coke-addled teenager). He is apparently the best at what he does. He tells her not to worry; she can go home. Enter Rusty, who has also been hired for this clean-up job by the faceless hotel owner. The two are advised to work together against their wishes. Rusty mocks Danny; Danny snarls at Rusty. It’s the middle of the night in New York City. Things are going okay – until they find a bag of cocaine and the dead teenager (Austin Abrams) comes alive.

This is when Wolfs becomes a standard drugs-and-mafia fixer comedy. There’s a lot happening: a Chinatown chase, a Croatian disco stand-off, an Albanian shootout, a panicked Kartik-Aaryan-like monologue by the kid who’s trying to explain himself. Naturally, the grumpy fixers grow a heart and feel protective about the kid – the typical two-badasses-parenting-their-hostage template. They become an unlikely family of three, teaming up to undo a drug drop before the sun comes up.

It’s nothing we haven’t seen before, but what grates is that the film tries to be a comedy despite having the heart of a deadpan drama. The humour doesn’t always slap (at least not like its corresponding assassin titles like Hit Man and The Killer), particularly when the teenager is treated brutally by the very men we’re supposed to warm up to. There’s a total of one moment of inspiration – a slow-mo shot of the teen being run over by Danny’s car only to land on his feet like an accidental gymnast, eliciting a joyous gasp from a chasing Rusty in the process. But it’s hard to believe that Chinatown and Harlem are empty enough for a teen to sprint across in underwear, almost die and not alarm anyone. It’s the Mumbai problem; try making a movie about the disposing of a body in a city that never sleeps.

The other problem is that Clooney and Pitt aren’t exactly Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. They’re charismatic old stars and great to watch, of course, but they’re too self-aware and performative to pull off an unorthodox buddy movie. They’re not Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe from The Nice Guys either, because this film isn’t half as witty or coherent. I’d rather watch the scene from Ocean’s Thirteen on loop, where Rusty walks into a tearful Danny’s room to find him watching Oprah only to get a lump in his own throat within seconds. This entire film feels like it’s trying to replicate that exact chemistry again. There are only sparks, and unfortunately, they aren’t enough to light a fire.

You expect better from a director like Jon Watts, who breathed some life into Marvel with his three Spider-Man movies (the cutesy Tom Holland ones). It’s hard to go wrong with the sheer celebrityhood of Clooney and Pitt in one frame, but Wolfs plays it too safe. Despite an intriguing start, it sort of collapses into a barrel of genre cliches. Visually, a nocturnal romp through New York has rarely been so formulaic. This is a rare high-profile misfire for Apple TV+ as well, a platform that ironically does not publicise any of its excellent titles but didn’t mind premiering this one at the Venice Film Festival. At the end of the day, it’s still all about the big names. So what if they’re only 'wolfs' in sheep's clothing?

Wolfs is currently streaming on Apple TV+.