Wolfs - Review

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

THE central pairing of George Clooney and Brad Pitt makes for irresistibly enjoyable viewing in Jon Watts' engaging crime caper Wolfs.

The duo play a couple of fixers, whose job it is to clear up other people's messes. In this case, it's coming to the aid of Amy Ryan's Margaret, whose late night hook-up with a young lad (Austin Abrams) in a luxury New York hotel ends prematurely when the latter crashes into a plate glass table after jumping on the bed and looks to have killed himself.

Panicked and alone, Margaret calls Jack (Clooney) to dispose of the body and clean up the scene, while the hotel itself (mindful of its reputation) calls Nick (Pitt) to do the same. Both men think they're the only guys for the job and have previously worked as lone wolves. But now circumstances have paired them together and they must navigate their own misgivings and scepticism towards each other to resolve their latest predicament.

To complicate things a little further, Abrams' young lad isn't dead. And he has a stash of drugs that puts him on a wanted list. So, the job at hand transforms itself from 'simple' clean-up op to finding the owners of the drugs and returning the narcotics to them, deciding whether to kill the kid and making sense of why there are various other parties interested in their activities.

Watts' film is a slick if slight affair that takes place over the course of a single night. Yet while setting up a number of intriguing scenarios, it doesn't always deliver on the outcomes - the wider world in which Nick and Jack operate in barely gets a look, with a lot of the exposition and explanation for what's going on arriving in the form of the central pair bickering over their differing interpretations of their plight.

There's also a curious lack of depth to any of the characters - much of Watts' script is implied, especially in relation to Pitt and Clooney; yet it also short-changes Abrams and largely wastes the prsence of Ryan (even though her face appears on a bus station poster late on).

Hence, Wolfs treads a fine line between treating the audience with intelligence and requiring them to do a little too much work... and there will doubtless be many that feel as though it is lacking something in the storytelling department.

This shortcoming perhaps feels more pronounced given Watts previous work - he is, after all, the writer-director who delivered a gloriously out there indie hit with Cop Car, a confidently bright and breezy Spider-Man reboot (in Homecoming, complete with a neat twist) and, most recently, a first class TV thriller in the Jeff Bridges-led The Old Man. And even here, he delivers one or two decent set pieces that bring the film a certain sense of style.

But his biggest asset lies most definitely in the presence of Clooney and Pitt, whose undoubted charisma helps to paper over so many of the film's cracks.

The two have long been off-screen friends, whose easygoing chemistry has previously contributed to a memorable ensemble in the Ocean's 11 films, as well as the Coens' hit Burn After Reading. Here, they clearly enjoying bouncing off each other, even if the chemistry on-screen is deliberately more frosty (in a subversion of expectation).

Where Danny Ocean and Rusty Ryan in the Ocean films clearly respected each other and almost finished each other's sentences, such was their repartee, here they look to continually get one over each other, their comic disdain giving rise to many a wry smile.

It's a relationship that sustains the film through its highs and lows and which even leaves you wanting to see more.