There are few droll joys in cinema more satisfying than watching and hearing George Clooney and Brad Pitt exchange knowing looks and wry, occasionally pointed banter. They've appeared in several films together, but the camaraderie stuff mainly happens in the "Ocean's" caper films directed by Steven Soderbergh. (In the Coen Brothers' 2008 "Burn After Reading," to name one of their other on-screen collaborations, the relationship between their characters does not, spoiler alert, survive their non-introduction.) There are no more such films on anyone's docket, but "Wolfs," written and directed by Jon Watts, does, despite its nameless main characters having a largely antagonistic kind of kinship, work hard to give its stars some of that old Danny and Rusty feeling.
Watts deliberately, and almost ceaselessly, plays on these performers' status as the Last White Male Movie Stars, and even more so as the Last White Aging Male Movie Stars. (Their characters don't move as quickly as they did when they wore younger men's clothes, and late in the film they take to sharing an Advil bottle.) Pitt and Clooney play cleaners for hire—not the dry kind but the criminal kind. When an ambitious politico played by Amy Ryan has a luxury hotel assignation that ends with a probable corpse in her hotel room, she phones a contact listed on her device only as a pair of brackets. And then along comes George, black turtleneck sweatered, with a nice leather coat, some latex gloves, and other tools of his trade. But he is followed in short order by a similarly dressed Brad, summoned by the owners of the hotel. And the two soon start low-key bickering about who's going to do the lion's share of the cleaning while poor Ryan has to blubber with a bloody blouse for a while.
Despite a spectacular supporting cast that also includes the great Richard Kind, and some voice work by Frances McDormand, "Wolfs" is a duet in cool for its two principals, at least up until the problem they were arguing over the cleaning of proves more animated than had been previously believed. Austin Abrams plays a character known only as "Kid," and he's simultaneously terrified and awed by the men who are in charge of his fate. The proceedings are further enlivened by four bricks of heroin-or-something-like-it (some of the more amusing banter has the Wolfs arguing about the possibility of a "magic drug") and some murderous Albanians who are looking for those bricks. The various plot twists and attempted escapes yield a bravura multi-borough New York chase scene that could have been trimmed by a couple of minutes but definitely represents a coup for the picture's location coordinator David Fox and his crew, and kudos to them. And while there's a fair amount of grisly violence here (something Watts is no stranger to; the fact that he directed the trashy, amoral horror film "Clown" gave me some misgivings about this enterprise), it's more cartoonish than anything else.
This is neither a trifle nor a truly Major Motion Picture; it's an entertainment maybe in the sense that Graham Greene used the term. But one needn't be so hifalutin about the matter. Fact is, it's a smile to hear Clooney utter again the familiar line "What's the play here?" and Pitt protest, a little later on, "I don't work that way." And deep-cut appreciators will appreciate the mini-homage to "Ocean's" producer Jerry Weintraub in the form of a late-introduced character who's a Sinatra super fan.
This review was filed from the premiere at the Venice Film Festival. It opens on September 20th.
