WOLFS (2024) – Fun despite an overdose of Clooney and Pitt smugness

Fans of the Ocean Eleven franchise will no doubt be thrilled by the reunion of George Clooney and Brad Pitt teaming up in this comedy thriller. It has been a while since both of these Hollywood icons have starred in any major movie much less sharing the screen together, so it is not surprising the film received a fair amount of fanfare when it was premiered recently at the Venice Film Festival.

Clooney and Brad play two professional “fixers” who somehow both get assigned to “clean up” the mess of a seemingly messy misadventure of a lady of high social standing. As both take pride in their work and reputation, the thought of having to work with each other here is understandably repulsive. The film basically rides on this main theme and let our two main stars do what they do best, namely a lot of humorous squabbling and smugs thrown at each other. This coupled by a witty script provided the film with enough, star power, amusing one liners, and cheeky verbal battering to keep things entertaining enough. However, too much of as good thing can somethings backfire. In this case, the “cute” antagonism between Brad and Clooney does get a bit tiring after a while as they were beginning to feel like a one trick act.

The key problem is that the two stars basically behave like how they do when they are doing their promotional rounds. They are just playing a slight variety of themselves which makes it difficult for us to see the two characters they play as anyone except George Clooney and Brad Pitt doing a skit. Thankfully, we had a third player, referred merely as “The Kid” in the film. This character truly came alive in the second act, bringing about a bout of fresh energy and unpredictability to the plot. Austin Abrams who plays The Kid is really good. He has an incredible monologue somewhere in the middle of the movie which was both funny and helped establish the nature of his character perfectly within that one scene. He was also made to run alot and do some crazy stuff, and by the final act, manages to win our hearts and I dare say, steal some of the thunder from the two main stars.

Before I watched Wolfs I had set my expectations low because I was kind of expecting an overdose of Clooney and Pitt humour. I wasn’t that far wrong with that. What I did not expect though, was how cleverly written and directed the whole thing was, which made the whole experience of watching what happens to our protagonists over one hell of a night, actually fun! This is largely thanks to the film’s writer and director, Jon Watts. Jon is best known for directing a number of the recent Spiderman movies with Tom Holland. Although this is a departure from the superhero genre that he is familiar with, he still manages to hit the mark here with enough humour, action and characters to capture our imagination for almost two hours.