Wolfs: Is George Clooney a movie star? Not if he makes many more films like this

George Clooney recently complained that Quentin Tarantino doesn’t consider him a movie star. If he makes many more films like this, Clooney will soon prove Tarantino right. He and Brad Pitt possess all the charisma of a pair of Sports Direct mugs in this Diplodocus-footed crime comedy about two rival underworld fixers who are forced to collaborate on the same messy job. 

Wolfs, which premiered at Venice this evening, gestures back to a time when two A-listers and a snappy premise was enough to have the box-office thronging. And writer-director Jon Watts, of the three most recent Spider-Man films, has clearly modelled it on the scabrous Shane Black buddy capers of old. 

But in place of Black’s profane, pin-sharp repartee and mazy plots with breakneck reversals is a series of effortfully wacky crises, during which Clooney and Pitt keep repeating themselves and swearing where the funny dialogue should be.

Even the incident that gets things underway doesn’t remotely convince. Amy Ryan plays New York City’s district attorney, and we’re invited to believe she has rented a $10,000 hotel suite in New York for a one-night stand with an unkempt, gormless, not especially handsome student (Austin Abrams) she met in said hotel foyer half an hour beforehand. (Presumably Ryan’s character was originally male, until someone noticed there was only one female role – Poorna Jagannathan’s underworld medic, herself less human than plot device – in the entire film.)

Drugs are consumed, and the student slips and falls to the floor in his underwear; definitely unconscious, possibly dead. Her career flashing before her eyes, Ryan calls for Clooney – while the hotel’s surveillance-crazed manager (an off-screen Frances McDormand) notices help is required and sends in Pitt too.

Both are stung to discover they’re not quite the lone wolf they thought – hence the title’s grammatical flub, one assumes. So they grudgingly pool resources, first to get the youngster out of the hotel, and then to work out what to do with the four blocks of stolen cocaine they discover in his rucksack. Clooney’s joints crack as he heaves the kid’s prone body around, and Pitt groans while bending over; later, while checking an address on a pager, both men reach for their reading glasses. This is as close as Wolfs ever comes to a solid running gag, but it feels more like groundwork for a potentially sweet subplot about ageing that never materialises.