Wolves, Make That Wolfs, in Winter

Dig this: two men so singular they can’t be a standard plural. Instead of wolves you have Wolfs, a pretty decent comedy-thriller written and directed by Jon Watts. Brad Pitt and George Clooney are the two lone wolves, or wolfs, each of them a coolly efficient solo operator who disappears messes for the rich and guilty. Clooney’s man comes off as more hard-bitten and authoritative (“All right, here’s what’s gonna happen”), Pitt’s as more wincingly amused and aloof. But they’re equally annoyed when called in to vanish the same semi-naked body. In fact, each is annoyed to find out that the other even exists. The unflappable are flapped at last and it’s by the dirtiest trick that circumstances could pull. Each thought he was the one and only. Now each realizes he’s one of two, and what will he do about it?

That’s the story lurking beneath the well-executed shootouts and chases of this snappy but somewhat melancholy film. As you might expect, one of the characters uses a temporary advantage to ride the other, the balance quickly evens out, and then the two work together against common perils. Before Wolfs is done, they discover that a rival can be a peer and even a friend; instead of the loneliness of the man outside the law, there’s life as two men outside the law. The discovery comes just in time, since the movie’s about two characters, and two actors, now hitting their 60s. Age shows up as a series of jokes—Advil in the glove compartment, Pitt’s agile stoop ending in a pained grunt, the glasses going on when an all-important pager beeps—and as a bleak awareness that the end really is near. Discussing how their sort of career finishes out, Clooney puts a finger behind his temple, execution-style.

Maybe a buddy film ought to be about opposites, not sames. At any rate, this very clever and well-made movie is never boring but still not a blast. Pitt’s the way he’s been in many films before, and the same for Clooney; that’s the point, and it’s good to see them before age calls off the act, but by definition a last hurrah involves things you’ve seen before. The two leads are supported by a top-notch cast, among them Amy Ryan as the hapless rich person in need of a cleaner, Poorna Jagannathan as a clandestine doctor, Richard Kind as an outer boroughs Sinatra fanatic, and Austin Abrams as the fanatic’s son. A movie starring the aged tends to have someone on hand representing the younger generation; if not a pretty girl, the kid will tend to be a nebbish or a ding-a-ling. Abrams plays a ding-a-ling, a motormouth Bambi, and he’s great. Perhaps to make sure the old guys aren’t upstaged virility-wise, Abrams spends the film dressed absurdly, most often in a woman’s blouse; only his cheekbones save the effect from being grotesque. But his physical comedy is hilarious and he delivers a set-piece speech that may be the film’s highlight.

The screenplay plays up the seen-it-before sense of reprising the familiar, in this cases movies about drugs and gangsters. Men with machine guns pile into the scene. “Is that—?” demands Pitt. “The Albanians,” grits Clooney. Clooney does some plot explanation on the fly: “So the Grange has a thing with Diego, but Dimitri’s playing both ends against the middle.” The plot reaches a point of complexity, and the two stars a state of symbiosis, where 20 or 30 seconds pass as the guys fire sentence stubs back and forth. They’re piecing together the bad guys’ machinations, but we’re not really supposed to follow. It’s more of a Mannerist display of late-genre virtuosity.

Larkin Seiple’s glossy, dark cinematography shows a wintertime New York City thronging with frosty blues and swarming patches of black. The film achieves a quiet sort of grandeur when a gangland boss (that’s Dimitri, played by Zlatko Buric or possibly Leon Wieseltier) apologizes to his plump daughter for the gunplay that just interrupted her wedding feast. Discontented, she moues back and is then lost from the film.