The overriding tension in “Wolfs,” starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt as rival fixers brought in to clean up the same crime, isn’t so much the threat of police arrest or Albanian mob assassination — both of which are concerns. It’s that Clooney and Pitt aren’t pals. The two start out as strangers to one another.
It’s a testament to Clooney and Pitt’s jovial on-and-off screen chemistry, and their bond in shared movie-star charisma, that it’s genuinely discombobulating to hear Pitt tersely call Clooney “sir” as he does in the opening scenes of Jon Watts’ winning, clever caper. Pitt and Clooney first acted together in 2001’s “Ocean’s Eleven.” And like that remake riff on the Rat Pack original, “Wolfs” is as much, if not more, about its movie stars as it is anything else.
The movie’s appeal is mostly in their easy charm and chemistry — the little eye rolls and games of one-upmanship that accrue until, finally, they’re buddies, like we want them to be. Clooney is 63 and Pitt is 60, and there are few bits about back pain and Advil in Watts’ film. But “Wolfs,” which opens in limited theaters Friday and streams next week on Apple TV+, is designed to show you that they can still, without ever really breaking a sweat, get the job done.
When their characters meet, they are both standing in the penthouse of a luxury New York hotel where a tough-on-crime district attorney (Amy Ryan) is in desperate need of a cover up. A young, nearly nake.