The movie-stars-are-over era has been overstated. If audiences are now drawn to movies not for stars but for franchise concepts, I’m not sure how to fit the career of Timothée Chalamet into that; Emma Stone and Zendaya would also like a word. That said, when you watch George Clooney and Brad Pitt in “Wolfs,” a clever, airy, winningly light-fingered and debonair action comedy about two rival fixers who have to learn to work together, you’d be forgiven for describing the sensation you feel as movie-star nostalgia.
These two have been stars since the ’90s, and no one, least of all themselves, is pretending that they’re young. Yet no one makes aging into the new cool more than they do. Clooney is the rare actor who has always worn his gray like the essence of glamour (when you catch a shot of him in the old days, the dark hair looks all wrong), and now, at 63, with a silver beard and hair not just two-tone but marbled, he’s achieved a kind of fine-wine mystique. As for Pitt, a mere spring chicken at 60, he kind of is ageless.
Yet as “Wolfs” demonstrates, the splendid way these two look would mean little if it weren’t matched by their killer swagger. It’s almost as if they made this movie to remind us all how it’s done.
“Wolfs” opens in a deluxe penthouse hotel suite in New York, where Margaret (Amy Ryan), a district attorney, is in a distraught panic. There’s a young man, seemingly dead, lying next to the bed in his underwear, with smashed glass all around him. What happened? She picked him up in the hotel bar, they came to the room, and he was jumping up and down on the bed when he accidentally fell and smashed through a glass table. File it under “shit happens.” To avoid a big mess, Margaret calls a number she has had in her contacts but has never used. It’s the number of a fixer, played by Clooney, who immediately starts telling her what to do on the phone, exuding the dry authority of … Michael Clayton.
Before long, Clooney shows up at the suite, slipping on his blue surgical fixer gloves, telling Margaret to sit down and have a stiff drink and not to worry, because he’ll take care of everything. He will make it all disappear. It goes according to plan until a few minutes later, when there’s a knock at the door, and who comes in but Pitt, wearing the same blue gloves. He’s a fixer too. Who called him? The owner of the hotel, Pam (we hear her only as a voice on the phone), who saw the whole scene on a hidden security camera and wants the mess cleaned up as much as Margaret does. She doesn’t need her hotel being toxified by scandal.
Neither of the two men is ever named. Clooney’s character, referred to in the credits simply as “Margaret’s man,” is a figure of Swiss-watch precision and time-tested methods, all driven by the conviction that no one else can do what he does. But the arrival of Pitt, known only as “Pam’s man,” throws a monkey wrench into that. Clooney looks at Pitt as if he were a pretender, a mere amateur in the fixer game, but, in fact, both are experts at … well, fixing.
The spark plug of “Wolfs,” as written and directed by Jon Watts (who directed all three of the Tom Holland “Spider-Man” films), is the nonstop stream of hostility and one-upmanship that passes between Clooney and Pitt like something out of an acid screwball comedy. It’s not just that the two characters don’t like each other. Each is invested in his own superiority — the special finesse of his skills. And so their back-and-forth isn’t just about the putdowns. It’s a kind of lethal contest to see who has the most fixer zen.
Clooney and Pitt had this kind of chemistry before, in “Ocean’s Eleven,” where the unstated joke was that though they were rivals for Julia Roberts’ affection who kept trying to top each other, it was in the very edginess of that competition that they found their bond. In “Wolfs,” Clooney and Pitt revel in the crack timing, in the I-truly-do-not-like-you obscene banter, that makes even the most casual insult take wing. As the movie goes on, these two will learn to work together, but the film’s anti-grammatical title is saying that each one is a lone wolf. They have no desire to mesh like wolves. The joke, of course, is that from their stylish leather jackets to their secret Mr. Big to their reading glasses, they’re kind of the same man.
Clooney’s character knows a trick or two about how to hoist a body onto a hotel cart, and for a while, as the two take the elevator down to the parking garage, where they stow the body in the trunk of Clooney’s car, the movie is all gambits and procedure, sort of like an improvised “Ocean’s Duet.” But it pivots and turns into a different sort of movie (I feel compelled to issue a spoiler alert, though this happens fairly early on) after the corpse…refuses to lie still.
“Wolfs” turns into one of those buddy movies with a flaked-out wild card of a third wheel. Austin Abrams, from “Euphoria” and “The Walking Dead,” plays the aforementioned dude in his underwear, known only as “kid.” He turns out to be a likably jabbering space case, like Timothée Chalamet infused with the spirit of the young Sam Rockwell. (At one point he has to wear a dress as a shirt, which is very Chalamet.) The key complication is that the kid was carrying four bricks of heroin in his backpack worth $250,000. How did he get them? He was doing a friend a favor, but the bottom line is that the fixers need to find out where those drug parcels came from and return them.
At a certain point, you realize that this task isn’t truly about “fixing” (it could have been the plot of a “Stakeout” sequel in the ’80s), and the movie slips into more of a mock-standard-crime-thriller mode. But the mood retains its buoyancy, thanks to how Clooney and Pitt, even as they’re teaming up, never lose an opportunity to take the piss out of each other. Quirks are revealed, like Clooney’s penchant for getting to the bottom of what’s happening by floating intricate conspiracy theories. A nightclub party sequence, in which they have to pretend not to know each other to avoid bringing down the wrath of an Albanian drug kingpin, proves to be a highlight of their improvised partnership. The scene in a diner at the end has a tasty tongue-in-cheek fatalism.
Coming out of the first showing of “Wolfs” at the Venice Film Festival, a friend asked me if I tend to take a movie like this one, which will probably be streamed on Apple much more than it will be seen in movie theaters, and rate it on a made-for-streaming curve. The answer is no, though it’s a good question, and you certainly could rate it both ways. Next to the vast majority of made-for-streaming fodder, “Wolfs” looks the essence of a classy, witty, stylish entertainment. It looks downright old-fashioned (in a good way). But as a movie, which will indeed play in theaters, it is, in the end, a well-made throwaway, no more and no less. The buddy movie is always, on some level, a platonic love story, but in this case by the time Clooney and Pitt locate their bond, they’ve come close to erasing the premise of the movie: that the key to a fixer is that he can’t afford to have a heart. These two never lose their cool, but by the end you almost feel like they’ve put on sheep’s clothing.
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