Wolfs review – Pitt and Clooney are job-sharing loners in Spidey-meme of a thriller

Brad Pitt and George Clooney play two sides of the same coin in Jon Watts’s jaunty, high-concept comedy-thriller about a pair of self-styled lone wolves who find they’ve been double-booked. Watts earned his spurs as the director of the money-spinning Spider-Man: Homecoming trilogy and he sets about Wolfs with the panting relief of a man who now feels he can kick back, let loose and consign the Marvel salt-mine to history. Except that the joke might be on him because what he’s made is basically the film of the meme in which two Spideys point at each other.

Exterior, night: the Manhattan skyline. A crash of glass, a woman’s scream. Margaret (Amy Ryan, thankless role) has been cavorting with a young stud she picked up in a bar, but now the kid’s dead and who’s she gonna call? Margaret calls Clooney, who reckons himself to be the only man for the job. The hotel calls Pitt, who feels much the same way - and therein lies the problem; these two aren’t lone wolves after all. Wolfs, incidentally, lists the stars’ characters as Nick and Jack, although so far as I could tell they never actually state their names. Implicitly the film wants us to regard them as Pitt and Clooney.

If Watts had seen fit to flip the ticket - to cast Pitt as Jack and Clooney as Nick - would it have made any difference? Almost certainly not, because the point is that these fixers are two peas in a pod. They share the same gravelly growl and the same narrowed stare. They both have black leather jackets and greying stubble. Their get-up is diverting, and borders on the comical. At times Pitt and Clooney might be the stars of a homoerotic Hollywood version of The Hairy Bikers in which the celebrity chefs are tasked with chasing a semi-naked youth around town.

Nick and Jack’s job should be simple, but naturally events intervene. The young stud (who is credited as Kid and played with a gauche, beta-male charm by Austin Abrams) turns out not to be dead and then promptly absconds. Now he’s running amok through Lower Manhattan in his pants with the clean-up men in hot pursuit; grumbling about their bad backs, complaining that they’re too old for this shit.

Related: Don’t believe supposed salary figures for new film Wolfs, says Clooney

The film itself never amounts to much more than a silly, self-satisfied crime caper, but the headline stars look as though they are enjoying themselves and their sense of fun, by and large, is infectious. Plot twist follows twist, the stakes keep being raised. There is a bag of drugs in the trunk and a bunch of Albanian gangsters in the car park – surely all would be lost if Nick and Jack didn’t fancy themselves as such smooth operators. We know this because they have a habit of playing Sade’s Smooth Operator in the car.

The kid assumes that they’re partners. He giggles and says, “You’re basically the same guy.” This of course is the central conceit of Wolfs, although it finally proves to be the film’s limitation, once the initial gag has worn thin and the caper starts to spin its wheels. Great buddy movies are undeniably about common ground, but they are also about difference and friction, in the same way that a great sporting rivalry is defined by its clash of styles. Redford needed Newman just as Djokovic needs Nadal; Watts’s two wolves can only growl and howl themselves hoarse.

• Wolfs screened at the Venice film festival; it will be in North American cinemas from 20 September, and on Apple TV+ globally from 27 September.