Wolfs

At first glance, Wolfs, the first non-Spider-Man film from director Jon Watts since 2015’s Cop Car, seems to be something of a Pulp Fiction/Quentin Tarantino riff. There’s that deliberately grammatically inaccurate title, which nods to Harvey Keitel’s character from that film, a well-dressed man who ‘solves problems’ when a dead body unhelpfully shows up. There’s a MacGuffin in a bag. There’s a junkie who gets a shot of adrenaline. There’s even a POV shot from a car boot.

In fact, the director Watts is aping here is Shane Black. To its snowy, Christmas-set core, Wolfs is a Shane Black movie that Shane Black never got round to making. It doesn’t quite share his talent for witty dialogue or outlandish action, but it has the Black sensibility down, telling a story about — as one character puts it — “an absolutely fucking clusterfuck of a mess”. And it has, joyfully leading from the front, two guys who are too old for this shit.

George Clooney and Brad Pitt — last seen sharing a movie screen 16 years ago in Burn After Reading — both play fixers, two sides of the same handsome, leather-jacketed, salt-and-pepper-haired coin. Their services are both engaged by a panicky District Attorney (Amy Ryan, underused) after a man appears to die suddenly in her hotel suite. She calls one to make the problem go away, but another seems to be hired by the hotel for the same gig. What initially appears to be a simple body-disposal job soon escalates into a much bigger criminal conspiracy involving an Albanian crime family.

Somehow manages to be almost pathologically watchable.

The wider plot doesn’t especially matter, Watts emphasising this strategy by masking exposition with cross-talking dialogue. The point is clear: we are here to luxuriate in the glow of two A-list movie stars, together again, buddying up over one long New York night-gone-wrong. For the most part, it’s a gambit that works, the stars’ chemistry never in doubt, even if they’re less ‘Ocean’s 2’ than Grumpy Old Men (both embrace self-deprecating gags about their advancing years).

You wish the film around them had as much razzle-dazzle, though. New York at night has an obvious cinematic pedigree, but Watts’ camera finds none of the neon seediness of After Hours or the grimy grit of The Warriors. It lacks a certain panache. (At least it really was shot in Manhattan, unlike the largely Atlanta-filmed Spider-Man movies.)

The script could have used some tightening too, with some gags that are almost funny, dialogue one punch-up away from a laugh. Still, with fun set-pieces — best among them a diversion to a delightfully sleazy motel, and a ludicrous ultra-slow-motion car crash — and the guaranteed dynamite of its one-two-punch pairing, it somehow manages to be almost pathologically watchable.