VENICE, Italy—District Attorney Margaret (Amy Ryan) is in big trouble. On an impulse, she invited a younger man back to her hotel room—and it was going well…until he collapsed on the floor and died. What was supposed to be a fun night of debauchery and stress relief turned into something awful. She’s terrified and covered in blood. Being discovered in this state would be disastrous for her career. There’s only one person Margaret can call: a Wolf.
They work alone, and only alone. Wolfs are fixers—they do the work that nobody else is willing to do, and they do it discreetly. Wind up with a dead guy in your hotel room? A Wolf is who you call to make sure that guy not only is no longer in your room, but that there’s no trace that that person ever was anywhere near you at all. These are the people who work in the underbelly of society, leaving no trace. They have names, and they may even have families. But you’ll never learn anything about them. “There’s nobody who can do what I do,” George Clooney’s character tells Margaret.
Except there is someone who does exactly what Clooney’s character does. He’s another Wolf, and he’s played by Brad Pitt. While Margaret called Clooney’s Wolf, the hotel, spying on its guests, called Pitt’s Wolf. And as these people thrive on working entirely alone, they have no idea who one another is. But there’s one thing that they can both agree on: They don’t want to work with anyone else. Ever. But they decide the only chance they have of completing this task is for the pair of them to do something they’d never dream of doing: working together.
Wolfs, which just premiered at the Venice Film Festival, is an unbearable comedy with jokes all surrounding a single theme: These guys don’t want to work together. Driving along with Clooney and Pitt in Wolfs captures all the thrilling fun of your kids shouting “Are we there yet?” ad infinitum. It repeats the same joke over and over (and over again). And just when you think Wolfs might be interested in moving onto fresh new material, it attempts the same punchline again, in its 400th variation.
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George Clooney and Brad Pitt arriving at the Venice Film Festival
Ernesto Ruscio/Getty Images
Wolfs should go down like gangbusters. Clooney and Pitt are two of the biggest movie stars in the world, and writer-director Jon Watts is behind the hugely successful and critically admired MCU Spider-Man trilogy. But Wolfs is an idea without any follow-through—it’s like someone pitched a compelling tagline in a meeting and forgot to fill it out with any actual ideas after the fact. It’s big-budget filmmaking at its most vacant. Clooney and Pitt are gifted actors, and they’ve had great success working together in movies like Burn After Reading and the Oceans trilogy. But they’re both delivering auto-piloted performances here, moving their mouths and churning out exhausting dialogue because they’re being paid a lot of money to do so (more than $35 million apiece according to The New York Times).
They’re both lifeless and their characters lack any interiority. The joke is that they’re annoyed with each other and are convinced that they work completely differently, when the reality is that they’re extremely similar. This renders both their characters identical—if they swapped all their dialogue, it would make no difference whatsoever. Austin Abrams is the only major player to walk away unscathed from Wolfs, delivering a charming and genuinely funny performance as a man who unexpectedly finds himself assisting the fixers.
I can only assume Wolfs made it into the Venice lineup because the star power was enough to get it here. But Wolfs provides ample evidence that celebrity wattage is not nearly enough, especially when neither star seems particularly invested in being on screen. This is a movie in desperate need of another dimension. Its set pieces are uninspired and lifeless, and the script grinds to a halt every time you think things are about to gain momentum. If you’re still curious about Wolfs, just watch the trailer—it has every “highlight” of the movie in a few digestible minutes.
