Clooney and Pitt on autopilot in average action comedy

The stars reunite in writer-director Jon Watts’ crime drama, which will air on Apple TV+ after a short theatrical run.

Adam Graham
| Detroit News Film Critic

George Clooney and Brad Pitt do their thing George Clooney and Brad Pitt, with diminishing returns, in “Wolfs,” an exercise in skimming the two movie superstars.

Wait, shouldn’t a Clooney-Pitt duo be one of the biggest titles of the fall? You’d think so, but after about a half-hour of “Wolfs,” it’s clear why that’s not the case. The film is getting a short theatrical run before hitting Apple TV+ on September 27.

Clooney plays a fixer, one of those movie characters the rich and powerful use to quietly make unseemly problems disappear, like Winston Wolfe, played by Harvey Keitel in “Pulp Fiction,” who is called in by district attorney Margaret (Amy Ryan) when a young man she had brought to her Manhattan hotel room accidentally dies after impaling himself on a drinks cart. It’s the job of Clooney’s character (he’s known in the script only as “Margaret’s man”) to make this little problem disappear, and the audience gets to revel in the granular details of his cleaning procedures.

And then a man knocks on the door. He’s played by Brad Pitt — the script calls him “Pam’s Man” — and he’s also a repairman, and he’s been hired by the hotel to make this little problem go away. (It turns out there was a little surveillance camera in the room, so much for privacy.) So now these two repairmen — these two lone wolves (get it?), who don’t know each other exists — come face to face and size each other up.

Who will make the first move, who will blink first? And how long will it be before the two stars resume their usual rhythm, that of the “ocean”?

In the end, it’s not for long. Clooney and Pitt’s characters are soon bickering like an old married couple, criticizing each other’s techniques and trying to calm each other down. The plot thickens when a few bricks of illegal drugs are discovered in the hotel room, and the kid who was thought to be dead (Austin Abrams, who could pass for Timothée Chalamet’s cousin) turns out not to be as dead as first thought. And now they have to work together to figure out what’s going on.

If this movie were really about the details of cleaning up crime scenes without being caught, it would have required a much more precise and darker filmmaker. Writer-director Jon Watts, the man behind Tom Holland’s “Spider-Man” movies, is mostly interested in the chemistry and back-and-forth between Clooney and Pitt, and he quickly lowers the stakes of their storyline.

Which makes the details of everything they do less important, because the film is no longer about two highly skilled professionals working in the shadows, but about two extremely charismatic stars having fun together by pretending to be angry with each other, while trading on their respective star power.

Of course, it would take a galactic event for these two not to be charming, dashing, and totally enjoyable to be around, but “Wolfs” doesn’t challenge them in any way. Rather, it challenges the audience, as the story builds to an increasingly ridiculous night on the town, all set in a bizarrely empty New York. Things get really tense when the pair end up in a line dance together at an Albanian wedding reception.

Clooney, 63, and Pitt, 60, are dance partners in the sense that their tics and mannerisms fill the rhythms between their lyrics. They are both slightly gray in their roles, age beginning to creep up on them, but “Wolfs” doesn’t try to explore anything beneath the surface of their charm. It’s all skin deep, and they’re proud of it.

Abrams, the duo’s third wheel for much of the film, acts mostly like a lost puppy, and he wears on the viewer’s patience. The same goes for the film, though there are obviously worse stars to watch on screen. “Wolfs” just doesn’t give viewers anything to scream about.

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“The Wolves”

NOTE: C

Rated R: For language and some violent content

Duration: 108 minutes

In Emagine Canton, on Apple TV+ on September 27