Brad Pitt and George Clooney play two sides of the same coin in Jon Watts’s jaunty, high-concept comedy-thriller about a pair of self-styled lone wolves who find they’ve been double-booked. Watts earned his spurs as the director of the money-spinning Spider-Man: Homecoming trilogy and he sets about Wolfs with the panting relief of a man who now feels he can kick back, let loose and consign the Marvel salt-mine to history. Except that the joke might be on him because what he’s made is basically the film of the meme in which two Spideys point at each other.
Exterior, night: the Manhattan skyline. A crash of glass, a woman’s scream. Margaret (Amy Ryan, thankless role) has been cavorting with a young stud she picked up in a bar, but now the kid’s dead and who’s she gonna call? Margaret calls Clooney, who reckons himself to be the only man for the job. The hotel calls Pitt, who feels much the same way - and therein lies the problem; these two aren’t lone wolves after all. Wolfs, incidentally, lists the stars’ characters as Nick and Jack, although so far as I could tell they never actually state their names. Implicitly the film wants us to regard them as Pitt and Clooney.
