Wolfs is lax, quiet entertainment

You know what you’re going to get as soon as you hear about it Wolfenan Apple TV+ film written and directed by Jon Watts (Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far From HomeAnd Spider-Man: No way home) and with unusual star power in the form of George Clooney and Brad Pitt. It’ll be a mildly entertaining buddy movie tailored to them, a low-stakes action comedy to watch when there’s nothing better to watch and you want something vaguely affable on screen.

It’s about two nameless fixers, each a lone wolf who thinks he’s the only one who can handle cleaning up and covering up murder scenes with maximum professionalism. For complicated reasons, they are sent to the same crime scene and are forced to deal with it together. Both are prickly and resentful, insulting each other non-stop, until certain developments begin to make it clear that this is no ordinary illegal mess they’ve gotten themselves into. You guessed it: they’ll have to work together to figure out what’s really going on and why they’re actually called in.

So, now you know everything. You can just imagine all the byplay: Clooney doing that sharp head turn thing with his eyes open and his jaw jutted out that he does to express maximum impatience in an argument, Pitt staring disdainfully as he lets out a laconic burn lures, and so on. . The complicated crimes, the strange developments, the way the lone wolves gradually open up to their strange paths in life and start to become friends, and so on.

The only surprise about their casting and performances is that Clooney plays the fixer who is supposed to be the significantly older man, while Pitt is the fixer of the younger generation, making their rivalry even more fraught. Since Clooney is actually sixty-three years old and Pitt is sixty, a few visual signifiers are needed to make them seem a little less like absolute peers. Clooney grows a gray beard, while Pitt’s graying hair is dyed a more youthful blonde brown, and the rest is left for the viewer to imagine.

The critical response to Wolfen is pretty lukewarm, but I must confess that I enjoyed it for a very special reason. I had just looked Megapolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s go-for-broke late-career art film spectacle, which is such a sad, demoralizing failure, it was heart-relieving to watch a low-stakes, low-key genre film that more or less achieves its easy action-comedy goals. Wolfen is too slow and never generates the out-of-control momentum of dark hilarity it seems to be going for, but otherwise it saunters along and does its thing quite pleasantly, and that seemed like an entertainment gift to me.

It helps immensely that the film is packed with great talent. I assume that’s because Clooney and Pitt also produced it, through their production companies Smokehouse Pictures and Plan B Entertainment. You know it must be something like that when top actors show up to play very small roles. Amy Ryan stars in the opening scene as Margaret, the Manhattan district attorney who picks up a much younger man at a hotel party, a never-named twenty-something naif called The Kid (Austin Abrams). She soon regrets it. As she tells it on the Clooney Fixer, the Kid jumped for joy on the bed when he fell backwards on the bar cart, hit his head and died among the broken glassware.

Now she has to make this whole grim scenario go away, and she desperately wants to convince the dubious Clooney Fixer that The Kid “was NOT a prostitute!”

But in the meantime, posh hotel owner Pam, who has surveillance cameras everywhere, has noticed the unsavory developments in Margaret’s room and sends her own on-call worker, the Pitt Fixer, to handle matters. Pam is just an authoritative voice on the phone, but that voice is Frances McDormand’s.

Later, the great actor Richard Kind appears in a role so small that you miss him when you go to the kitchen to get another beer. But he nails his minor character as memorably as ever.

Given all this top talent, it’s striking that the most compelling performance in the film is given by its least known actor, Austin Abrams (Euphoria, The walking dead) as the child. Which I guess is a spoiler, because in order to pull off that feat, it means the Kid can’t actually be dead before the main plot even gets going.

Abrams is great as the nerdy kid who is so far out of his depth in a world of murder sweeps, major drug shipments and organized crime that he’s like a baby duck in a shooting gallery. “Adorable” is, I believe, the word, and The Kid is nervously garrulous as he delivers some long, twitchy monologues that Abrams handles wonderfully while threatened on both sides by the anxious Fixers who have no time to waste, mostly because the Albanian mafia is about to appear.

Either way, it’s available on Apple TV+ if you need it. Lax, unambitious entertainment that you hardly have to pay attention to has its uses in these dark times.