Review | Venice 2024: Wolfs movie review – Brad Pitt, George Clooney in laid-back comic thriller
Aided by the excellent Amy Adams and a compelling set-up, Ocean’s Eleven alums bring sizzle to Wolfs. It’s slick, light and a lot of fun
3/5 stars
Unveiled out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, Wolfs is a comic thriller that skates along primarily thanks to the laid-back bonhomie of its two stars, George Clooney and Brad Pitt.
These two long-time buddies, who first worked together in Ocean’s Eleven, are back playing rival “cleaners” in this New York-set tale. Both dressed in blacks and greys, uttering the same gnomic phrases, as Austin Abrams’ Kid points out, “You’re, like, basically the same guy.”
Neither Pitt nor Clooney has a name in the film, perhaps because their star power is so enormous we’ll only ever know them as Brad and George.
One chilly night in the Big Apple, Clooney’s fixer is called to a penthouse in a plush hotel by a shaken District Attorney named Margaret (Amy Ryan). In the bedroom is the Kid (Austin Abrams), who she thinks is dead, after he fell and crashed into a drinks trolley. Running a campaign to get tough on crime, the DA knows that if this gets out, it could ruin her.
Then Pitt turns up, it soon emerging he’s been hired by the hotel owner to clean up this mess. With identities compromised, it means that he and Clooney will have to work together, a job that becomes increasingly complicated when a bag of drugs is found and the Kid turns out not to be dead.
