Movie review
“Wolfs” is a great idea for a crime comedy, but it isn’t a particularly great movie. Here’s the premise, which I dare you to not want to watch: A woman (Amy Ryan), who we later learn to be a tough-on-crime district attorney, suddenly finds herself covered in blood in a fancy New York hotel room with a much younger man who appears to be a) a prostitute and b) very dead. Frantic, she calls up a fixer to get herself out of this mess — the kind of man who employs garbage bags and duct tape and discretion to make problems go away. He arrives — and so, for reasons too lengthy to get into here, does another fixer. These two lone-wolf types reluctantly conclude that they’ll need to work together.
Oh, and did I mention that these two guys are played by George Clooney and Brad Pitt? If you remember the wisecracking chemistry of these two real-life friends in the “Ocean’s” movies, you get why this movie, in all likelihood, was greenlit faster than your average getaway car. And yes, there are moments in “Wolfs” where that chemistry crackles perfectly — the timing with which these two old pros, trying to read a number on a pager, simultaneously whip out their reading glasses is priceless. But really, you watch it waiting for things to get started, and reluctantly realize toward the end that it isn’t going to; it’s a cat-and-mouse thriller with two cats and no mouse.
None of this is the fault of Clooney and Pitt (well, maybe it partly is; they’re both producers of the film), but let’s place the bulk of the blame on writer/director Jon Watts, who had comedy gold in front of him and didn’t know what to do with it. The story takes place on one long winter’s night, as snow slowly blankets the city and our two fixers (whose names we are never told; I decided they’re called George and Brad) make their way through varying levels of crime worlds. It’s all rather darker, both literally and figuratively, than a movie featuring these two should be, and we never really get a sense of who these guys are, and why they do what they do.
Regardless, if George Clooney muttering sardonic asides in a black turtleneck is your particular jam, “Wolfs” is no hardship to sit through. At times, he and Pitt have a similar amused quality, as if they’re making things up as they go along and wondering whether they’ll get away with it; pity the movie doesn’t have more of them irritably talking over each other, or silently eye-rolling. “You two are the coolest guys I’ve ever seen,” a young character tells the fixers, late in the film; it’s unearned praise, but you wish it weren’t.