Stars like George Clooney and Brad Pitt can't salvage the lifeless Wolfs

A dead body in a hotel room. That's the beginning of many crime stories, including the new Jon Watts directorial effort Wolfs. District attorney Margaret (Amy Ryan) has a corpse in her hotel room and she needs it to vanish without her reputation getting dinged. This is where Jack (George Clooney) comes into play. He's a fixer dressed in all black that can make any problem go away. There's just one teeny tiny issue: he's not the only fixer that's been sent to this scene. The owner of the fancy hotel Margaret is staying at has hired Nick (Brad Pitt) to handle this problem.

Neither Jack nor Nick works well with others. That’s just not why you get into this profession. But now they’re forced to dispose of this body together…only it turns out this younger guy, Kid (Austin Abrams), isn't as dead as he once seemed. And he's got a lot of drugs in his backpack that could belong to a local crime kingpin. It's going to be a long December night for these two lone wolves (that’s the title of the movie).

Wolfs is a slog. There's absolutely no word for it. Watts has concocted a feature that has absolutely no momentum from one scene to the next. The two leading men of the 2000s Ocean’s movies have now anchored a feature that’s the total antithesis of those sexy and sleek Steven Soderbergh features. A key issue at play is the movie’s cowardly vagueness. It's understandable that Jack and Nick wouldn't divulge every aspect of their personal lives in their line of work. Yet Watts never gives audiences any tangible aspects of these two men to explain their frayed dynamic.

There aren't obvious class or age differences between Jack and Nick to inform their innately hostile attitudes toward each other. They also aren’t drastically different in personality or approaches to their job. The kid even makes a dumb meta-joke about how similar they are in the movie’s final half-hour. There’s just no exciting variety in their conflicted rapport. Granted, overly similar character personalities would be more forgivable if the duo’s “witty banter” wasn’t so grating. Clooney and Pitt lifelessly trade tired barbs involving phrases like “Ya got a place?” or just yell simultaneously when all other sources of comedy fail. In other words, Jack and Nick are not a pair of characters that provide consistent entertainment for two hours.

The snowy nighttime New York City these criminals inhabit is even more generically defined. It’s absolutely criminal how sterile the Big Apple looks in Wolfs. Countless mesmerizing movies occupy frantic New York City nights realized with deeply tangible cinematography. Think of features like After Hours or Uncut Gems. You can feel the paint peeling or the crusty brick walls in those motion pictures. The real New York's lived-in quality palpably exists within every frame.

Wolfs, meanwhile, inhabit an eerily vacant and crisp vision of snowy nighttime New York. Watts and cinematographer Larkin Seiple shoot this project with an Arri Alexa 35 camera delivering images that make every environment look overly clean. When Nick and Jack visit a back-alley doctor, the operating table is devoid of grime or dents. Even a later rendezvous to a rundown hotel for sexual encounters crawling with rats and roaches looks a smidge too clean. It’s all just so “perfect” and devoid of personality. “Defects” make the real world interesting. The same is true for fictional film domains.

Wolfs wield no interest in such imperfections or having fun. Just look at the lifeless costumes and sets littered throughout the movie. Even a run-in with a wedding hosted by big Albanian gangster Dimitri (Zlatko Burić) doesn't result in any exciting lavish imagery. The outfits and backdrops remain as forgettable as ever. An over-riding lack of a pulse even permeates the fleeting few action sequences in Wolfs. A lengthy chase scene involving Brad Pitt chasing over a near-naked twenty-something shouldn’t be so tedious. The staging and editing of this sequence accomplish just that.

Only composer Theodore Shapiro shows up to Wolfs with some crackling creative energy. For nearly 30 years, Shapiro has been a go-to composer for light comedies like Central Intelligence and We're the Millers. With 2022's excellent TV show Severance, Shapiro demonstrated his gift for more ominous compositions. With Wolfs, he once again reaffirms his musical versatility. Early in the film’s runtime, Shapiro delivers light-footed compositions involving instruments like a flute that would’ve perfectly fit a Saul Bass title sequence from the 60s. Later, he embraces a more electronic sound for a pivotal chase scene. There’s a variety to Shapiro’s orchestral tracks that’s incredibly satisfying. If only the rest of Wolfs was willing to challenge expectations.

Even Theodore Shapiro would admit, though, that most audiences aren’t going to watch Wolfs for him. The primary selling point for this movie is the reunion of Clooney and Pitt. Unfortunately, neither one delivers very interesting work here. Pitt’s quiet wise-guy routine is mostly shrug-worthy. Clooney's lead performance, meanwhile, is especially lacking in charm or memorable line deliveries. It's also frustrating that this movie continues Clooney's recent trend (between this, Ticket to Paradise, and The Flash) of looking backward in his career. He’s just working with familiar faces from his biggest 2000s hit or playing Bruce Wayne again.

The fierce creative conviction underpinning deeply entertaining Clooney works like those Ocean's movies or Out of Sight is nowhere in Wolfs. This lackluster feature from Jon Watts follows up the man’s four previous movies (Cop Car and a trio of Spider-Man movies) hinging on youthful exuberance. Tension and danger lurked in those earlier Watts works, particularly in Cop Car. Yet the excitement of being young and having access to a cop car or a superhero identity permeated their creative souls. That ebullience has been replaced with two old guys mumbling half-baked snarky lines to one another. At least viewers will find it relatable that Clooney and Pitt look bored during Wolfs.