‘Wolfs’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Jon Watts. US. 2024. 108mins

This movie was made for one reason: a lot of people want to see George Clooney and Brad Pitt together on screen again. It has been 16 years since Burn After Reading, 17 since Oceans Thirteen. What a relief, then, that Wolfs not only delivers on that basic contract, but pays overtime. Channeling Redford and Newman with a splash of Lemmon and Matthau, Pitt and Clooney sparkle in a self-aware action comedy that oozes New York noir stylishness. It’s a film that plays engagingly with the public perception of their rapport as one of joshing rivalry, expressed via ironic put-downs that pulse with mutual admiration. 

 A classic bromantic comedy

Wolfs, in other words, is a classic bromantic comedy. Two rather arrogant fixers who each believe they are unique at what they do are both hired for the same messy job and forced by circumstance to work together. You might think you could write this stuff yourself – the initial disbelief, the mistrust, the attempts to trip each other up, the gradual, grudging thaw as each lone wolf sees in his rival a reflection of himself –  but you couldn’t. Comedy is tough, shoot-em-up comedy arguably even tougher. Director Jon Watts’ self-penned script possesses a faultless sense of timing, and it becomes the gift that keeps on giving in the hands of Clooney, Pitt and a fine supporting cast.

It’s little wonder that Apple Original Films has already tapped Watts to write a sequel. It’s just a shame that this film will get a limited release of just one week before launching globally on Apple TV+ on September 27. Wolfs’ debut at the Venice film festival, where it screened out of competition, was proof that this smart, good-looking widescreen delight works well with an audience.

It’s winter in New York, and wet flakes of snow are falling onto slushy sidewalks. In a suite of a swanky high-rise Manhattan hotel, Amy Ryans’ district attorney is hyperventilating. She took a kid she picked up in the lobby back to her room for some cougarish fun – and now he appears to be dead. She calls a number she has long had on her phone, and Clooney’s guy arrives – curt, professional, wearing blue latex gloves. A few minutes later, so does Pitt’s – hired not by the panicked DA, but by the hotel owner. Disgusted but boxed in, the two are forced to cooperate over a night that becomes a lot longer when the kid, played engagingly by Austin Abrams, is revealed not to be quite as dead as he looked.

Their names are not the only things these two are reluctant to reveal. Fixers are mythical beings, and the they behave a little like professional magicians. Clooney’s guy has a neat body-disposal trick involving a hotel luggage cart which he hates having to show his rival. Pitt’s guy is smug about his exclusive deal with Poorna Jagannathan’s Chinatown doctor who patches guys like them up – until he realises that she and his rival have priors. As each scores points off the other, age scores points off both – there’s that creakiness in the joints, that breathlessness during a footchase, that moment when, confronted with text on a pager, both whip out their reading glasses.

Yet at the same time there is an urban sheen here, a touch of the Michael Manns, that keeps Wolfs classy as the one-liners and the bodies pile up. Everything Everywhere All At Once cinematographer Larkin Seiple coats every exterior in clammy, rusty light that makes you want to wash your hands. Production designer Jade Healy was clearly having the time of her life too – in particular with the cheesy ‘Safari Room’ in a love motel.

Wolfs hits just the right note of winking archness in the way it acknowledges that there is something meta-cinematic going on in a film where Clooney’s guy and Pitt’s guy are also Clooney and Pitt – both, of course, producers these days as much as actors. When, in that jungle motel room, they both get exasperated by the way Abrams’ character can’t seem to locate the most important element of the story of how he ended up in this mess, we can just picture them sitting behind a big desk, listening to a script pitch.