Producers: Jon Watts, Dianne McGunigle, Brad Pitt, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, George Clooney and Grant Heslov Director: Jon Watts Screenplay: Jon Watts Cast: Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Amy Ryan, Austin Abrams, Poorna Jagannathan, Zlatko Burić, Richard Kind, Vladimir Sizov and Frances McDormand Distributor: Apple+
Grade: C+
The star wattage is strong, if aging, but it provides only a feeble spark in Jon Watts’s “Wolfs,” a recycling of buddy action-comedy tropes of the sort that are commonly applied to opposites (a cop and a crook, say) who have to work together and become pals in the process. Here the duo in what might be better termed a frenemy action-comedy are two “fixers,” those mysterious specialists who are called in to clean up messes, including corpses, that might lead to legal problems for their employers. In this case they’re referred to simply as “Margaret’s Man” and “Pamela’s Man” after the women who summon them to a nasty scene.
Margaret (Amy Ryan) is a powerful NYC DA who visits a hotel bar on her way home to her daughter and invites a young man there, simply called The Kid (Austin Abrams), to the room she takes under an alias. In the throes of passion he jumps around on the bed, falls over backward and crashes into a glass table, apparently dead. In a panic Margaret calls her guy (George Clooney), whom a person whose name she refuses to divulge has identified as a go-to specialist in such emergencies, and persuades him to come over. He arrives, calms her down and prepares to do his job.
But then there shows up Pamela’s guy (Brad Pitt), summoned for the same task by the hotel’s owner (always shown from the back, like Mary Tyler Moore was in the old “Richard Diamond” TV show, but speaking in the voice of Frances McDormand), who’s been watching everything that unfolded via the spy camera she’d implanted in the room. The two men, each of whom operates as a “lone wolf,” are unhappy to see one another, but are convinced that they have to become reluctant partners, at least for the night, to resolve the situation.
The work proves more arduous than the two anticipated, of course; otherwise there would be no movie, or a very short one. Initially we’re treated to lengthy scenes of banter between the men, none of it particularly inspired but all made tolerable by the stars, coasting along on the affection they’ve built with audiences over the years and the sense of easygoing camaraderie they carry over from their previous on-screen collaborations (in particular to “Ocean’s” movies, fondly referenced in a virtual tribute to Frank Sinatra near the close).
But the genre demands that things go into high-octave mode periodically, and though it wouldn’t be fair to go into much detail about the convoluted plot machinations (driven by the fact that The Kid was carrying very valuable bricks of drugs), there’s a pretty spectacular chase sequence, on streets and well above them, that seems to go on forever, as well as a big shoot-out with the gang of a Croatian mobster named Dimitri (Zlatko Burić) led by his chief bodyguard (Vladimir Sizov).
The action has to be complemented with other elements, though, so Watts also provides an interlude with a sassy doctor (Poorna Jagannathan) in whom each man claims a proprietary interest—yet another kind of rivalry—as well as a comic sequence in which the two have to join in a big ensemble dance at a wedding reception presided over by Dimitri. And then there’s that Sinatra sequence, where the inimitable Richard Kind makes an appearance as The Kid’s puzzled father.
None of this amounts to much, the screenplay being much less clever than it thinks it is, culminating in a scrambled last-minute conversation in which the two lone wolfs explain that the whole affair was actually much more complicated than either we or they thought, which in turn leads to a freeze frame that inevitably will call to mind other buddy action-comedy endings.
But though the movie’s just a genre trifle, it’s buoyed to some extent by its stars, with Clooney at home playing the gruffer, more serious of the two men and Pitt happily wearing the bemused air he does so well. Neither is taxed by the script at all, any more than Cary Grant was in his late-career pictures, but they make it an easygoing lark. The real surprise is Adams, whose deft performance actually outshines theirs.
On the technical level, “Wolfs” is an eminently professional job. Jade Heal’s production design and Amy Wescott’s costumes are okay, and though cinematographer Larkin Seiple is hobbled by the fact that almost everything happens in dark, gloomy environments (save for the wedding sequence), he and editor Andrew Weisblum work together to keep the plot twists reasonably clear (you’ll want to stay through the final credit crawl for some important summing-up narrative information, though). Theodore Shapiro contributes an inconsequential score, and having the end credits accompanied by Sade’s “Smooth Operator” points up the movie’s old-fashioned vibe, along with an aspiration to coolness it doesn’t manage to capture.