Wolfs review: George Clooney and Brad Pitt are goddamn movie stars, this is our excuse to hang out with them

The order and position of how an actor’s name appears at the start of a movie is carefully negotiated. If you’re the lead, you get your own title card and first. If your name is sharing the screen with others, a higher, left-hand position confers superior status.

But when you see two names on a screen at the same time and the one on the left is sitting lower than the one on the right, it’s a mark that these are two stars of the same billing. It’s rare.

When it comes to movie star wattage, George Clooney and Brad Pitt are true equals, and their names appear as such. They are the last generation of old-school movie stars, the ones who sell tickets and put bums on seats.

So, what does it say about the state of the movie star if even the combined attraction of Clooney and Pitt can’t get Wolfs a cinema release outside of a very limited run in the US? It was on the theatre schedule in Australia but was then pulled when Apple decided that the film would go straight to streaming in every international territory.

The package of Clooney, Pitt and director Jon Watts (Spider-Man: No Way Home) was clearly a big deal because the project sparked a bidding war in 2021 between most of the major studios and streamers. Everyone wanted to make and release Wolfs.

Fast forward three years and Hollywood’s business model continues to be in flux to the point that there was obviously a lack of confidence that audiences would not pay $25 to see Clooney and Pitt in their first reunion since a small but memorable scene in Burn After Reading.

Clooney and Pitt may be in their 60s but neither have lost that onscreen spark, and they have long established that together they have excellent, sometimes prickly banter. It’s why you would watch Wolfs, for them — and that’s the mark of a real movie star, when the project and the role barely matter.

That’s the difference between, for example, a Marvel or Star Wars movie with big names and a regular film with movie stars. A Marvel project will always be described as “It’s a Marvel movie and it has Chris Evans”. Whereas a movie with Clooney and Pitt is, foremost: “That George Clooney and Brad Pitt movie, it’s called Wolfs”.

They play two professional fixers who are unnamed in the film, but we’ll call them George and Brad because you never see them as anyone other than themselves.

Usually that’s not a good thing, but here it works because their star power and the familiarity of Clooney’s sometimes goofiness and Pitt’s cheekiness is the point. Wolfs is just the platform for spending time in their company.

George and Brad have been separately called to clean up the mess of a misadventure between a prominent politician (Amy Ryan) and a young lover (Austin Abrams) in which he appears to be dead. They work alone but, in this instance, have been pressured into doing this together.

Turns out, the kid is not dead and he is in possession of four bricks of cocaine which probably belong to a powerful gang. Those are complications. Wolfs takes place over one night as the pair of initially antagonistic rivals figure out how to solve their problem.

For a caper, Wolfs is a little slow-going at first and doesn’t pick up momentum until Abram’s The Kid wakes up and bolts (properly races) away from them in kinetic foot chase.

For all of Clooney and Pitt’s screen presence, Abrams is a great foil for them. He matches them in a way that Selena Gomez can effortlessly play in the same sandbox as Steve Martin and Martin Short in Only Murders in the Building. Abrams also gets a frenetic monologue and manages to pull a lot of empathy towards his character from George and Brad, and the audience.

Still, it’s the Clooney and Pitt show, and Wolfs plays with the fact they’re both ageing and likely wondering about their relevance/obsolescence.

Is their power diminished by having Wolfs play only on a small screen? Unavoidably, but this is just another instance in the continued decline of the traditional Hollywood system. But until it’s completely shuffled out, there is still value and joy to be had watching Clooney and Pitt be goddamn movie stars.

Rating: 3/5

Wolfs is on Apple TV+ from Friday, September 27