Wolfs: 'comedy thriller' stumbles despite George Clooney and Brad Pitt

"Time was when a new comedy thriller starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt would have been huge box-office news," said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. "But film-watching habits change and even the most handsome of leading men grow older, so it's a sign of gently diminished times that "Wolfs" is going straight to streaming, and probably won't be troubling voters overmuch come awards time."

Should 'pleasingly pass a Saturday night' 

Yet "Wolfs" is not undiverting. Clooney and Pitt have some fun with their roles as highly skilled "fixers" who operate as lone wolves, until they are both employed to make the dead body of a young man disappear from an upmarket New York hotel. 

The screenplay could have done with "a few more killer one-liners", but the film should "pleasingly pass a Saturday night". 

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Not that entertaining

"'Wolfs', which is an Apple TV production, carries itself as Hollywood entertainment like they used to make it," said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. "But it actually belongs to a very modern and depressing strain of cinema: the streaming platform work-creation scheme, in which famous names are slotted into lightweight action comedies in order to bring flesh-and-blood glamour to a digital brand." 

Having suffered through a few of these, "I'm not entirely convinced they're actually meant to be watched": rather, they're the movie equivalent of those rows of books you see in show homes that are actually made of cardboard.

"Wolfs" has a nice premise and starts well enough, said Alistair Harkness in The Scotsman. But for a film that is intended as pure entertainment, it's not that entertaining; and its stars' charm has morphed so far into smugness, they border on the annoying.