This is just basic moviegoing etiquette, but should you choose to catch “Wolfs” during its one-week theatrical release before it gets dumped in the Pine Barrens of Apple TV Plus, don’t walk in late. Because a key virtue of this comic thriller starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt is its welcome absence of preamble. Though it supplies ample amble, running its pair of aging crooks all around a weirdly depopulated New York City, writer-director Jon Watts’s breezy crime caper gets to its premise – public figure Amy Ryan needs a body disappeared – right from the opening frame.
Even if you’ve managed to avoid the fast-talking flick’s too-informative trailer over the past few months, you’ll catch its drift right away: “Ocean’s” trilogy headliners George and Brad play off-the-books problem-solvers, each one strictly a solo act, who must figure out why they’ve been summoned to the same penthouse suite to get rid of the same corpse. They must further negotiate how to adapt their closely guarded individual methods to an increasingly thorny task when 1) that body turns out to have been carrying a fortune in contraband that will surely be missed and 1b) said corpse turns out to be less than fully deceased.
So Clooney and Pitt’s first outing as scene partners since “Burn After Reading” 16 years ago turns out to be a pleasing, if largely predictable, lupine lark. And as the pre-corpse identified only as Kid, Austin Abrams (from “Euphoria” and “The Walking Dead,” appropriately) brings a welcome shot of vitality to the trio, rising from the dead to lead the two old-timers on a lengthy foot chase clad only in his tighty-whities – so much more humiliating than mere nudity.
Watts, whose low-budget, high-octane 2015 thriller “Cop Car” got him invited to the Marvel Cinematic Universe for three consecutive “Spider-Man” flicks, here reteams with “Cop Car” cinematographer Larkin Seiple (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”), who gives the picture a fable-like wintry glow. After working on a cosmic scale, both artists seem happy to make “Wolfs” the kind of savvy-but-unsophisticated fare you might not realize you’d missed – one of those movies where a guy answers the phone by asking, “How did you get this number?” One of those movies where someone who’s probably never received a W-2 intones with weary certitude, “That’s the job.”
You can’t fault Watts’s taste. “Wolfs” is a one-crazy-night movie like “After Hours” and a bickering-buddy movie like “Lethal Weapon” (though “Lethal Weapon 2” is the one it actually quotes). It’s a How’re These Lovable Scofflaws Gonna Get Out of This One? movie, like “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” First and foremost, it’s a movie about how the unseen infrastructure of criminality is all around us.
Not until it was half over did I realize that the never-named Clooney and Pitt figures are unofficial cinematic descendants of Winston “The Wolf” Wolfe, the legendary carcass-disposal man Harvey Keitel played three decades ago in “Pulp Fiction.” Had Quentin Tarantino named his genre-scrambling crime flick for its freshest creation, “Wolfs” might qualify as one of those plural sequels, a la “Aliens” or “Twisters.”
Anyway, “Wolfs” isn’t quite smart, but it’s quite-smart enough, ever ready to address the admittedly limited range of questions it provokes in the viewer’s mind. For example: How does Ryan’s character (gone too quickly from the movie) recall the very specific things she was instructed, long ago, to say on the phone if she ever needed to call Clooney for help? Like a candidate fresh from debate camp, Watts has an answer for that. Just like he has an answer for how Clooney can park his BMW anywhere his work requires, despite plying his trade in the most crowded city in America.
Attending to details like this can’t make a movie great, and “Wolfs” isn’t. But they can make a movie cool, which “Wolfs” decidedly is.
And that’s all it is, coasting amiably on the antagonistic chemistry of its two lions in winter. Watts, coming off a Marvel movie that grossed just under $2 billion, seems renewed by the change of cinematic seasons. This time, with great power comes only a modest sum of responsibility. It’s a refreshing change.
At theatres for one week, then available Sept. 27 on Apple TV Plus.
RATING: *** (THREE STARS OUT OF FOUR)