Wolf’s

This is a mild movie with mild thrills doing it’s best to trade on George Clooney and Brad Pitts movie star charisma and shared cinema past instead of doing the work. 

What work? You know the part where you create interesting characters, put them in increasingly dire situations and watch them scramble and bump off each other?

Yeah, there’s not much of that here. 

Instead, it’s Clooney and Pitt playing Clooney and Pitt in a movie where they are hardly ever challenged by any situation. No one wants to play weak and no one wants to be vulnerable. 

There are a couple of moments that got me. I enjoyed every song that magically played in Clooney’s car. A few of the action scenes did fine. And I liked the ending an awful lot because I’m a sucker for that particular way out. 

But the whole thing is weak tea. 

It’s Ocean’s 14 all the way down to the famous Clooney/Pitt shorthand conversations but without all those messy character actors or interesting scenes to gunk things up.

Look, I don’t want you to not watch this. Its out there maybe you will find more of it to love than I did. 

But what I would urge you to do is check out Clooney in Out of Sight and Pitt in Killing Them Softly. In both movies they (and everyone else) does the work necessary to bring interesting crime characters to life. 

And yeah, there’s always Ocean’s 11, which featured one of our greatest directors at the top of his game making a masterpiece while also just goofing around. 

Finally, the one other movie with Pitt and Clooney together that you ought to check out (and which goofs around in a very different way) is Burn After Reading. 

Here’s what I think ultimately of Wolf’s. Somewhere in the process somebody at the top of this thing said, “hey, we got Clooney, we got Pitt, don’t worry about it.” 

And they really should have worried about it.