When George Clooney and Brad Pitt show up together in a movie these days, it’s like old royalty strutting through Times Square in sunglasses: you don’t care why they’re there, you just want to watch them soak up every inch of spotlight. That’s Wolfs—Jon Watts’s breezy, over-familiar caper where the plot is more a rumor than a skeleton, but the charm is thick enough to swim in. Was I enthralled? Not exactly. But did I have a hell of a time? Absolutely. This is the sort of picture that glides on charisma and the friction of two megawatt stars shoulder-bumping through a city that knows how to keep its secrets tucked behind neon and hotel doors.
The setup is pure escapist comfort food: Amy Ryan, playing a DA with that just-rolled-out-of-bed-and-into-disaster swagger, wakes to a corpse, panic, and the need for professional cleanup. Enter our titular “fixers”—Clooney and Pitt—unnamed, unruffled, and apparently hired from the highest shelf of the Action-Comedy Hall of Fame. The movie never bothers itself with reinvention. Instead, it sinks you into that old, soft-heeled groove: the stylish footwork of two professionals bickering, flirting, and swapping one-liners over the remains of a crime scene. It’s the sort of film that makes you wonder if comfort has become Hollywood’s narcotic of choice.
But if you’re grading on pleasure, not profundity, I can’t knock it. Watts knows he’s not making Heat. He’s making something closer to an extended Ocean’s outtake: all surface zing, no spiritual residue. The city is just there for them to glide through—dodging real pain, dancing through crisis, finding the black comic heart somewhere between a loaded gun and a perfectly timed eye roll.
Clooney and Pitt—you just sit back and watch them work. It’s a chemistry with its own gravitational pull: old pros telepathically flicking banter back and forth, slipping into their routines with the smoothness of men who have been here (and everywhere) before. They riff, they needle, they cackle at their own dangers, making a meal of the kinds of lines that—delivered by lesser mortals—would shrivel on the tongue. Ryan, as the frazzled DA, doesn’t get to rewrite law or history, but she roots the cartoon with her weary intelligence. Austin Abrams, playing the expendable, half-bright “Kid,” pops in to keep things from getting too leathery, though he’s mostly here to signal that these fixers are basically the last grownups in the room.
Jon Watts’s big trick is knowing exactly what he’s got. He keeps the camera riding shotgun to every wisecrack, making his leading men the whole show. It’s direction calculated to please, not to provoke—which, in a film like this, is both the pleasure and the limit. The movie leans so hard on its stars and its rhythm that you almost don’t notice how softly it lands. The ending arrives with less a bang than a sheepish little bow. (“Thanks for coming, that’s all, folks.”) But the ride is so agreeably zippy, so glinted with that highball wit, that you can forgive it for never reaching the moral boil or suspenseful bite you might have half-hoped for.
The script crackles enough to keep you smiling, at least as long as Clooney and Pitt are exchanging verbal left hooks. The plot? Yes, it’s thinner than a decaf latte, and every twist is foreshadowed like a bump in a well-worn rug. But the dialogue hums, and every beat seems designed for the particular comic fingerprints of its stars. If Wolfs only ever skims the surface of feeling—never pausing for emotional depth—it’s because it’s having too much fun to risk a swim.
This is moviegoing as amusement park ride: exhilarating in the moment, disposable in the memory. For an hour and a half, you’re in the hands of people who remember how to be fun for fun’s sake, trusting that a sharp suit, a sharp tongue, and a soft landing are all you really need. It’s no Get Shorty, and it’s not out to displace Ocean’s Eleven (which it almost parodies by mere gravitational proximity). But sometimes the best diversion is just watching movie stars do what they were born to do—remind us we’re not so tired of the old magic after all.
So do I recommend it? Of course—all heart, no homework, just that lovely tickle of movie pleasure that knows exactly what it is and nothing more. The emotional stakes may be low, and the ending might leave you wanting a bit more, but sometimes it’s fine to float along on pixie dust and punchlines. Wolfs is the cinematic equivalent of catching a beloved old song on the radio: instantly familiar, a little corny, and absolutely impossible not to enjoy.
Is that enough? For a quiet Friday night, it’s more than enough.
