Brad Pitt and George Clooney are style icons for eternity. At least that is what a whole generation of film fans think, who remember the Ocean’s Eleven-movies. Not since Frank Sinatra’s original Ocean in 1960 have actors shown such nonchalance in front of the camera. And now Pitt and Clooney are back.
Your new film Wolf, which will be available to stream on Apple TV+ starting tomorrow, is well aware of the aura of the two Hollywood stars. The trailer for the thriller comedy already underlines the reputation of the two Hollywood stars as well-dressed scoundrels with a Sinatra song. But in the finished film it becomes clear that one co-star simply steals the show. And in just two minutes.
Watch the trailer for Wolfs here:
Wolves – Trailer (German) HD
Brad Pitt and George Clooney make bodies disappear: That’s what Wolf’s
Wolfs begins with a corpse. New York prosecutor Margaret (Amy Ryan) has brought a student (Austin Abrams) into her luxury suite as a secret sex adventure. Unfortunately, her chance acquaintance falls into a glass table while high on heroin and dies. Enter Fixer Number 1 (George Clooney).
Clooney’s character specializes in making unpleasant problems disappear for rich and powerful clients. He is professionalism personified: “Nobody can do what I can“, he explains of himself.
But then suddenly the competition is at the door: Fixer number 2 (Brad Pitt) is also supposed to make the body disappear. Both are lone wolves and not particularly keen on forming a team. When the student’s corpse finally turns out to be very much alive, chaos is complete.
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Brad Pitt and George Clooney are in top form
Anyone who wants to watch Wolfs because of Brad Pitt and George Clooney, and that certainly applies to most people, can rest assured: The two still have a unique chemistry that director Jon Watts (Spider-Man: No Way Home) doesn’t squander. When these two Hollywood giants bombard each other with witty jabs in the car, every fan has to grin broadly. That alone makes Wolfs worthwhile. But the best thing about the film is something else.
Austin Abrams’ 2-minute scene will leave you speechless
The best thing about the film is Austin Abrams, known from the Netflix series Dash & Lily. In just two minutes, the young co-star of Pitt and Clooney left me completely speechless. The situation is as follows: the two drug addicts have recaptured Abrams’ student after a clumsy escape attempt and are taking him to a shabby motel room for questioning. They need to know how a lanky kid like him got his hands on kilos of heroin. He tells them. And how he tells them.
In a two-minute, breathless, high-speed monologue, the hyper-nervous student reports on his day: about a fellow student whose mother has supposedly died and who asks him to step in for him as a drug courier. About the hotel he stumbles into unsuspectingly. About the self-confidence that his breaking of the law gives him, about three different women who make eyes at him, of the feeling of being attractive to the opposite sex, perhaps for the first time in his life, of sensing a magic in his life, of feeling that something is happening to his dull existence that is extraordinary and beautiful and exactly what he has always wanted.
Abrams twitches and trembles as he talks about his day without stopping, his words tumbling over each other. And his voice pleading, begging, desperate, when he talks about the women he has met, about flirting with Margaret, who takes him to her room, about his excitement that he is no longer boring, lonely and well-behaved. It is as if he has collided with the high-voltage cable of life.
That is why the 2-minute scene in Wolfs is so powerful
When the camera ends the slow panning of Abrams’ wildly gesticulating body after two minutes of monologue, we see Clooney’s and Pitt’s characters sitting on chairs in the room as if blown away. Watts knows what a brilliant moment he has created here: the fixers are only reflecting how the audience feels. Flat and speechless.
I cannot fully explain why Abrams’ monologue is so compelling. When he finished, I felt as if I had woken up from a dream: I had forgotten everything around me, that’s how strongly the short scene captivated me.
It is not just the words, not just the gestures or facial expressions or the threatening situation in which Abrams’ character finds himself. Watts makes the young student a sympathetic character by giving him the divining rod of existence: this young person wants to be loved and to be special. He wants his life to be more than just a dull process of meeting deadlines. When Watts cuts back to the stunned faces of Clooney and Pitt, he wants to say: Just like all of us. That’s why this moment is so powerful.
The two fixers had just wanted to beat the information out of the student, but now they are disarmed by their compassion. It is also a great scene for sympathy with the two main characters. But it remains an isolated case.
Wolfs is not a masterpiece, but fans of Pitt and Clooney will be happy
Because otherwise Wolfs can hardly surprise: banter between Pitt and Clooney, sporadic action scenes, a ride through the night with admittedly great neo-noir images. But Watts never really wants to decide between the buddy comedy and a nighttime thriller in the style of Collateral. He stays somewhere in the middle and is therefore, in short, neither funny nor exciting enough to be a masterpiece.
Pitt and Clooney fans won’t mind, and rightly so: such tongue-in-cheek duets between two mega-stars with unique chemistry have become far too rare these days. Somehow, Wolf’s has the faint hint of a swan song about it: as if the two actors, who embody Hollywood more strongly than almost any other living actor, were deliberately letting themselves be outdone. As if they wanted to make room for the enthusiasm of their successors. And say: now it’s your turn.
When and where can you see wolves?
Wolfs is from 27 September 2024 available on Apple TV+.