'Wolfs': Clooney and Pitt walk thin line between 'relaxed' and 'lax'

A generation ago, George Clooney worked with Brad Pitt in Vegas on a heist, in 2001, for director Steven Soderbergh’s remake of “Ocean’s Eleven.”

People went to theaters to see it, and lives were not changed, merely entertained for a couple of hours — though who knows, really? Thanks to ensemble ringers Carl Reiner and Elliott Gould, exemplars of an earlier, better-trained show business tradition, maybe a few moviegoers’ lives were changed, subtly, simply by watching the legendary pros strolling through, delivering their eccentric characterizations on a level of rare, blithe confidence unknown to the movie’s stars, even.

Two “Ocean’s” sequels followed, of varying quality. But Clooney and Pitt’s particular stardust — supercoolness cut with just enough wit, especially in Clooney’s case, for liftoff — did not vary.

Now it’s 2024 and the “Ocean’s” have trickled down into a stream. “Wolfs,” a diverting-enough reteaming of Clooney and Pitt, opens in select cinemas this week before a September 27 streaming release via Apple TV+.

One reason writer-director Jon Watts’ film gets by is ridiculously simple. In a streaming-dominant world where it takes real imagination for screenwriters not to write about idealized assassins-for-hire, “Wolfs” hangs its narrative on something a tiny bit different. Clooney and Pitt play rival underworld “fixers,” who clean up unauthorized crime scenes and political scandals for a handsome fee. This means danger, of course, and adversaries with guns. But for a fixer, the killing is a more of a job perk than a prerequisite.

Amy Ryan, ever valuable, plays a Manhattan district attorney, tough on crime, ambitious and unlucky. During a hotel room tryst with a handy bartender, the bartender has accidentally conked his head and is now deceased. One phone call later, there’s Clooney, murmuring questions without question marks, assuring the DA all will be clean and well and fine.

Clooney’s character remains nameless, as does Pitt’s. Minutes after Fixer One enters the hotel room, Fixer Two pays an unexpected visit, delivering the same assurances, and having just left the same barber for the same meticulous beard trim favoured by the slightly older, grumpier Fixer One. (Clooney is 63; Pitt is 60, and “Wolfs” features wee jokes about the fixers needing Advil and reading glasses.)

Their unseen project manager, voiced by Frances McDormand, is thrown for a loop by what appears to be a double booking. She encourages these two lone wolves to work together. The spelling of the title “Wolfs” archly indicates the difficulty of this. The corpse turns out to be injured, not dead, a naive sweetie played by Austin Abrams (“The Walking Dead,” “Euphoria”). He’s also a temporary drug mule, whose stash belongs to Albanian mobsters. “Wolfs” pinballs around Manhattan in the wee hours as the fixers accompany their bartender/mule on a mission to deliver the drugs.

Watts stage-manages some well-paced vehicular mayhem, opaquely plotted intrigue concerning the DA’s connections in the real estate world and many, many low-key zingers between Clooney and Pitt about their aging carcasses. (Some carcasses age better than others.) The filmmaker made the most recent trio of “Spider-Man” movies, which had a swifter sense of rhythm and pace than many superhero franchise items of late. “Wolfs” benefits from cinematographer Larkin Seiple, who lit and shot “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Seiple’s work here lays on the sleek shadows and strategic neon backlighting and velvety visual textures. The movie purrs; it’s more cat than movie.

Does it matter that “Wolfs” is about literally nothing except itself and its star packaging? Maybe not. On the other hand, Watts hasn’t written a single fleshed-out character. It’s about genre tropes, distilled to minimalist quipping amid maximalist mayhem. In this sort of entertainment, the line between “relaxed” and just plain “lax” can be so, so thin. It was the same with Apple’s recent action comedy “The Instigators,” starring two other “Ocean’s Eleven” alums, Matt Damon and Casey Affleck.

Of the two, “Wolfs” is the better forgettable movie. If the sequel comes to pass, I hope it can avoid the mistake of of diminishing its comic impulse, however uneven, in favour of more “edge,” i.e., rougher, more violent and, yes, because we are who we are, more commercial. Violence is easy; comedy is hard. And there was a time in Hollywood when essentially comic star vehicles weren’t recreational killing sprees in sheep’s clothing.