George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s new buddy cop film has been savaged by critics, who have called it a “messy” one-starrer and an “unbearable comedy”.
Wolfs, the $200 million Apple TV+ film in theaters Sept. 20, follows the two Ocean’s Eleven co-stars who are reluctantly forced to work together to “fix” a problem that arises when a tough-on-crime district attorney wakes up to a dead twenty-something she was having a one-night stand with.
But critics say the film, which had a record budget for any streaming movie, flops, with IGN’s Siddhant Adlakha criticizing It’s a “slick student film directed by a rich teenager who has subsisted on a media diet of early Guy Ritchie.”
Xan Brooks of The Guardian He also wrote that ‘the joke might be on’ director Jon Watts, who made a fortune on the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Spider-Man trilogy, ‘because what he’s made is basically the meme movie where two Spideys point at each other.’
And the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin called the film “messy” and wrote: “George Clooney recently complained that Quentin Tarantino doesn’t consider him a movie star. If he makes more films like this, Clooney will soon prove Tarantino right.”
Brad Pitt and George Clooney’s new Apple TV+ film has been slammed by critics
Adlakha writes that problems with the film, which premiered in Venice on Sunday night, “come up early and often.”
He and other critics say Watts seemed to have banked on Clooney and Pitt’s star status to make it a blockbuster, with a lackluster plot and a “half-baked script with little humor or heart.”
Barry Levitt of the Daily Beast argued that all the jokes revolve around the single idea that neither character wants to work with the other.
‘Driving with Clooney and Pitt in Wolfsby captures all the thrilling fun of your kids shouting “Are we there yet?” ad infinitum,’ Levitt said. writes.
“He repeats the same joke over and over (and over again). And just when you think Wolfs might be interested in moving on to new material, he tries the same joke again, in its 400th variation.”
Levitt goes on to write that both Clooney and Pitt are “giving performances on autopilot, moving their mouths and producing exhaustive dialogue because they get paid a lot of money to do so (more than $35 million each, according to The New York Times).”
Critics say the director seemed to rely on Clooney and Pitt’s star status to make the film a success.
One critic said Clooney and Pitt gave “autopilot performances here, moving their mouths and producing exhaustive dialogue because they get paid a lot of money to do so.”
At times, it feels like the script could be moving forward and offering more insight into the characters, Collin said, pointing to scenes where Clooney’s joints creak and Pitt groans as he leans over, and both reach for their reading glasses.
“This is the closest Wolfs gets to a solid running gag, but it feels more like a foundation for a potentially sweet subplot about aging that never materializes,” he writes.
Adlakha also says: ‘The longer Wolfs goes on (and boy does it go on; few 108-minute films seem this long), the more insulting it becomes to watch.’
The Apple TV+ movie had a record budget for any streaming film
In the end, some critics concluded that Wolfs suffers from the same problems as other streaming movies, with the BBC Writing which is “the kind of enjoyable but forgettable pastime that streaming services were created for.”
Collin is a bit harsher, writing that it belongs to “a very modern and depressing strain of filmmaking: the streaming-platform job creation scheme in which famous names are thrown into lightweight action comedies to bring flesh-and-blood glamour to a digital brand.
“Having suffered through all these films, I’m not entirely convinced they are really meant to be seen: they are more the cinematic equivalent of an imposing row of books in a model house that turns out to be a cardboard box,” says the critic.