‘Wolfs’ Venice Film Festival Review: It’s the George Clooney/Brad Pitt Show … And Little Else

Pick any scene featuring George Clooney and Brad Pitt in Steven Soderbergh’s Oceans trilogy, and the power of two stars colliding may prove blinding. These two icons since the ‘90s possess such ease with themselves in front of a camera that their comfort naturally transfers to a contemporary. It’s not that Clooney and Pitt can finish each other’s sentences. It’s that one doesn’t even have to finish the other’s thought; they just know because they’re locked in on the same frequency.

Jon Watts’ Apple TV+ original film Wolfs, the duo’s first reteaming since the beloved heist series, attempts to cash in on their effortless rapport. This action-comedy shamelessly casts their personas and does not even try to hide it. As dueling “cleaners” for high-profile individuals looking to avoid detection of criminal behavior, their characters don’t even have full names.

A District Attorney candidate, Margaret (Amy Ryan), looks to contract Clooney’s services when a young man (Austin Abrams) suffers an accident in her penthouse room. A few minutes after he shows up, Pitt enters to help contain the damage in the hotel for the owner Pam (voice of Frances McDormand). The credits refer to them, respectively, as “Margaret’s Man” and “Pam’s Man.” But names aren’t necessary in this transactional world – both among the characters in the film and the audience watching it. They might as well refer to each other as “George” and “Brad” because those are the associations the film trades on.

The two rivals have a history to which the script vaguely alludes. Watts parses out small morsels about their competition within the industry, which could be either banal banter to fill space or potential spinoff-generating loglines. But he could honestly just cut the banter and lean into their established history: the Oceans series and their associated press tours.

Wolfs has something of a plot, too, as it follows a single night on the job where this team of rivals must be both competitors and collaborators to preserve the reputations of their bosses. The two men dodge bullets and barbs alike in a whirlwind tour through New York’s criminal underbelly as complications arise from their seemingly simple fix. It’s slickly shot by cinematographer Larkin Seiple (best known for his work on Best Picture-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once) but generically conceived by Watts. Any hopes of him returning to the clever genre play of his delightful directorial debut Cop Car appears squelched by his time directing three Spider-Man films within the Marvel machine.

But, in all honesty, the real sustaining tension proves seeing how long the film can coast on just being “George Clooney and Brad Pitt: The Reunion.” Watts gets far more mileage than expected out of a concept that could just as easily function in the context of a Saturday Night Live sketch (where applause greeting the two stars would take up half the duration of the scene). But he doesn’t understand what Soderbergh did: stardom is but an artificial sweetener. This sugar rush of watching two familiar faces interacting can only sustain a work so long in the absence of style or substance.

Wolfs provides good fun for a while, especially given the dearth of vintage George Clooney leading man roles of late. (Please, someone lure him out of the director’s chair!) Watts knows how to play the hits and lean into their well-established screen figures. Clooney gets to do his debonair, silver-tongued schtick while Pitt rattles off his soft-spoken, sardonic observations with aplomb.

It’s exactly in line with expectations, for better but mostly worse. There are some gags about the two men’s age – pulling out readers, needing to pop an Advil, cracking backs, yawning – yet little in the way of reflecting what all that time watching them means. Unlike Top Gun Maverick, which took Tom Cruise’s advancing age as a subject, Wolfs just wants to make it 2001 again with these two giants. That’s fine when the film can subsist solely by feeding off their energy, although it’s not enough to survive a third act that forces unnecessary crime genre twists and turns.

Sony Pictures will release Wolfs in theaters for a one-week engagement on September 20 before Apple TV+ premieres it for streaming on September 27.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, The Playlist and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.