The actors hit the red carpet for the Venice International Film Festival to celebrate their upcoming movie, 'Wolfs' — see their most fun photos together
As the Venice International Film Festival kicked off, George and Amal Clooney arrived on the scene hand-in-hand, with Amal sporting a large sun hat and a yellow dress.
The Clooneys were in town ahead of the premiere of George's movie Wolfs, in which he stars alongside longtime friend Brad Pitt. As they arrived to the film festival via water taxi, Pitt and Clooney greeted the crowd in coordinating pale suits.
For the premiere of the film, Clooney and Pitt were joined by their significant others — Clooney's wife Amal and Pitt's girlfriend Ines de Ramon — for a very glamorous double date night.
The actors, who have starred together in movies including the Ocean's trilogy, Burn After Reading and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, had fun on the carpet interacting with fans and paparazzi.
Of collaborating with his longtime friend, George told PEOPLE during the festival: “It's fun to work with people you know really well.”
Pitt and Ramon walked hand-in-hand at the event following reports that he is “very happy” in his relationship.
The Plot
Most likely inspired by Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and the character of Winston “The Wolf” Wolf (as played by Harvey Keitel), this is a whole movie devoted to a character that dwells in the fringes of crime thrillers: The Fixer. It begins with a situation that desperately needs fixing: It’s Christmas, and New York DA Margaret Kretzer (Amy Ryan) is alone in a posh new Manhattan hotel and cursing blue murder with the body of a near-nude, drug-addled young man lying in a pool of blood and glass on the bedroom floor. In desperation, she whips out her cellphone and taps out a number that leads to a disconnected line.
Seconds later a voice calls her back: “How did you get this number?” The voice is calling from a payphone in a dive bar, and Margaret explains she was given his number for times exactly like this. As if paraphrasing an ’80s action poster, she tells him what she was told about him: “There’s only one man in this city that can do what you do. This man is a professional. This man is an expert.” He agrees to take the job and arrives within the hour after giving Margaret strict instructions to sit tight and not touch a single thing.
Played by Clooney, this is Margaret’s Man, and he sets to work with low-key gusto. Suddenly, however, there is a sound, and another man appears. The newcomer, played by Brad Pitt, is the Mr. Fixit hired by the hotel’s unseen owner, Pamela Dowd-Henry (voiced by Frances McDormand). Pam has been watching the night’s events on an illegal surveillance camera and demands the two men collaborate to clean up this “absolute clusterf*ck of a mess.” Margaret’s Man, the archetypal lone wolf, bristles at this unnecessary intervention, while Pam’s Man enjoys needling the (ever so slightly) older man as they set about disposing of the body and any sign that Kretzer was ever there.
A 'Wolfs' of a Time?
As a mop-up procedural, Wolfs is often very funny and most ingenious. Both men have thoughtfully brought clean outfits for the blood-soaked Kretzer to wear, and there’s a delicious moment where she takes a skirt from one man and a top from the other, leaving both slightly crestfallen. It quickly transpires that they are very, very competitive, and there’s a stylized, almost Hitchcockian vibe to the opening scenario, lightly reminiscent of Rope, as the two men quibble over the dark art of fixing.
The stakes ramp up slightly when Pam’s Man finds a bag tucked away behind a sideboard; inside are four bricks of a drug that looks suspiciously like heroin. This, obviously changes everything, and Pam, justifiably, freaks out, not wanting her bijou hotel getting caught in the crossfire of a cartel drug war. However, this isn’t the only humdinger of a surprise in store: the boy is not dead, and somehow he escapes their normally capable clutches, leading to an extraordinarily complicated chase that finds Margaret’s Man and Pam’s Man orchestrating a pincer movement by foot and by car.
This, however, is merely the starting point for a genial action comedy that, to be frank, will appeal mostly to audiences over 40, raised on a diet of movies with jaded, wisecracking characters that were born too old for this s—. The camaraderie is palpable and genuine, but the repartee is forced in comparison to the gentle physical comedy that both are so good at (and which they telegraphed so well in their best joint effort, the Coens’ 2008 Burn After Reading). The rat-a-tat dialogue, which at times seems self-congratulatory rather than funny, is particularly wearing, distracting from the needlessly verbose final reveal, which comes out (or does it?) in a head-spinning back-and-forth.
Luckily, both are old pros, but their over-familiarity does rob the film of surprise, which is sorely needed for a well-worn caper about stolen drugs and a vicious Croatian crimelord (played by Zlatko Burić in a criminally undercooked role). In this sense, Austin Abrams is the film’s MVP, the body from the hotel room, whose protestations (“I’m not a prostitute!”) fall on deaf ears and whose surprising backstory adds an interesting third wheel to the Midnight Run-style mismatched buddy premise.
Unsurprisingly, despite serving up the old Butch and Sundance ending, the film leaves the door wide open for a sequel — who is the fixer behind the fixers? — and, in stark opposition to the diminishing returns of the Ocean’s franchise, another go-around might actually nail things down. In fact, Watts is likely thinking of the Wolfverse right now…
Clooney and Pitt Give Back Salaries After Theatrical Deal Falls Through
The duo brought their banter and riffing to the Venice Film Festival for the world premiere of Jon Watt’s action comedy, in which they play competing criminal fixers accidentally assigned to the same job. The two movie stars and real-world pals traded friendly jabs, praise and filmmaking insights in Italy at a press conference for Wolfs.
At one point, Clooney explained that the pair gave portions of their salaries back after a theatrical deal fell through for the film, meaning it gets a limited release in “a couple of hundred theaters,” and brought up a New York Times article published last week by Nicole Sperling that said he and Pitt were paid more than $35 million each.
“[It was] an interesting article and whatever her source was for our salary, it is millions and millions and millions of dollars less than what was reported. And I am only saying that because I think it’s bad for our industry if that’s what people think is the standard bearer for salaries,” Clooney said. “I think that’s terrible, it’ll make it impossible to make films.”
“Yes, we wanted it to be released [in theaters]. We’ve had some bumps along the way, that happens. When I did [Clooney-directed biographical sports drama] The Boys in the Boat, we did it for MGM, and then it ended up being for Amazon and we didn’t get a foreign release at all, which was a surprise. There are elements of this that we are figuring out. You guys are all in this too. We’re all in this industry and we’re trying to find our way post-COVID and everything else, and so there’s some bumps along the way. It is a bummer of course, but on the other hand, a lot of people are going to see the film and we are getting a release in a few hundred theaters, so we’re getting a release. But yeah, it would’ve been nice if we to have a wide release.”
Just days before the two movie stars landed in Venice, news broke that Watts has a deal in place with Apple to write and direct a Wolfs sequel. It is unclear if Clooney and Pitt have also already signed on for the follow-up.
Is 'Wolfs' a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing?
It’s been a huge year for George Clooney getting rid of people. In an age where streaming platforms and clueless executives have been trying to enforce a “No More Movie Stars” mandate, Clooney spent about 15 solid years giving us smarmy lead turns that played on his uncanny ability to come across like a particularly charismatic working man. Danny Ocean, Michael Clayton, and Ryan Up-In-The-Air were impossibly handsome and charming, yes, but they also got tired, tried to hustle to a more comfortable life, and knew how to get along with others.
On paper, it’s why something like Wolfs should work, not just because Clooney is back in the saddle, playing a criminal who offsets his steely determination with smooth charm, but because he’s paired with another champion of “What if hot people did crimes?” casting, Brad Pitt. Pitt, like Clooney, knows that the most compelling larger-than-life characters often look like they’d rather be doing something else—remember when he reluctantly taught poker to Topher Grace in Ocean’s Eleven? That “I wish I was above this” vibe capably carries through to his most recent performances as stuntman Cliff Booth in Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood and hitman Ladybug in Bullet Train.
In Wolfs, Clooney and Pitt have weaponized their sizzling, banter-filled chemistry to play lone wolf “fixers” reluctantly paired on the same crime clean-up, but a couple of fatal mistakes prevent the film from being a satisfying throwback to their double-barreled charm—chief among them writer-director Jon Watts. Watts can’t deliver a worthy crime romp for these deserving talents, nor does he know how to spin Clooney and Pitt’s put-upon everyman charm into gold, leaving us with two leads matching each other’s tired energy in a film that is laborious when it should be electric.
The first non-Spider-Man film from writer-director Watts since 2015’s Cop Car, Wolfs unfolds over an eventful night in New York, where the two fixers’ usual routines are upended by their own insecurities around not being the best in the biz, and further spirals out of control when the cadaver they have to dispose of (Euphoria’s Austin Abrams) starts running around in his underwear. Perhaps the fact that this premise, with this cast, sounds like the platonic ideal of a movie is what sets it up for failure—over its five-year lifetime, Apple TV+ has gained a reputation for rolling out projects that sound like something worth watching, overspending on the sheen-heavy films and burying the more interesting ones. Wolfs is the perfect marriage of material and distributor: If you want to make a costly, near-lifeless mistake and have it hidden away for no one to discover it, you make a film for Apple TV+.
There are plenty of pithy insults to throw at Wolfs—Is it the first film directed by a BMW sponsorship, or a feature-length version of those Super Bowl commercials where actors reprise iconic characters to promote crypto?—but it’s the kind of misfire worth unpacking from the inside. Clooney’s unnamed fixer has been called in by Margaret (Amy Ryan), a “tough on crime” district attorney who now has a twentysomething kid lying immobile on the floor of her penthouse suite. Pitt’s fixer has been called in by the hotel manager to ensure that the expensive new hotel stays clear of controversy. Unbeknownst to them all, there’s a backpack stuffed with four bricks of heroin in the hotel room that’ll throw a monkey wrench in their plans A, B, and C.
From the moment our fixers clock each other in the bloody, glass-strewn suite, something is clearly off—the flat angles of Larkin Seiple’s cinematography and Andrew Weisblum’s leaden editing plainly reveal that Watts has not given his comedy any rhythm or his drama any tension. The following 100 minutes spends far too long watching two famous faces regard each other with a deadpan disbelief that reads instead as disaffected disinterest.
Clooney and Pitt have great chemistry—we have three Soderbergh films and three seconds of a Coen brothers movie to prove it—but the dialogue sparking it has always been cute and snappy, and their characters felt driven. When Danny and Rusty disagreed in Ocean’s Eleven, it was like watching charisma fireworks; when their urgency was synchronized, no one could get in their way. Watts instead strands his actors to riff for painful stretches of dramatic stalling, as our two fixers bicker about who has the better moves or connections. Everything they talk about is vague, gesturing at a whole world of secret maneuvers and liaisons that comes across as insubstantial rather than elegant. The premise of Wolfs necessitates that two nearly identical crime movie archetypes lead the action, but when Clooney and Pitt speak in their matching gravelly pitch, it becomes clear how uninteresting it is to watch a film with characters who don’t like each other because of how similar they are.
Outside of Clooney, Pitt, and Abrams, every character in Wolfs is present for exactly one scene. Amy Ryan as the DA, Poorna Jagannathan as a surgeon for wounded criminals, and Zlatko Burić as a Croatian gangster all enter the movie and then exit it in an episodic series of guest stars that would be more enjoyable if it felt like any of them were sharing the same story. But Wolfs so enthusiastically gives up on having a narrative that Watts neglects to realize that a convoluted, overstuffed plot is what these kinds of character comedies thrive on—his characters joke around a lot, but they have nothing to joke about, because every new obstacle is introduced just before the scene it happens in.
Wolfs isn’t interested in being a splashy action vehicle, but the Clooney fixer’s insistence on seeing everything as a conspiracy would be much more enjoyable if there were enough happening in the story to warrant such paranoid speculation. A comedy taking advantage of the typecasts of its two very famous leads comes with a certain self-awareness, but this love letter to the mid-budget romps of 2000s Hollywood stops at its casting and never extends to the craft that made those films notable.
Watts is keen on the surface texture of the behind-closed-doors subgenre of criminal flicks, but doesn’t understand how narratives like Michael Clayton or Mr. & Mrs. Smith function, how character depth naturally comes from exciting personalities reacting and responding to a detailed plot. Wolfs finally picks up in the last act when our fixers are forced to make a moral decision after Abrams’ unwitting, blabbering drug runner (the young actor doing a commendable job injecting some comedy into the film) has made his impact. But the dark, flat, ugly look of the action sucks the fun out of the chaotic final movements. Forget these two charisma-sapped bagmen; not even Michael Clayton could clean up this mess.
The Verdict
While 'Wolfs' is certainly watchable, especially for fans of Clooney and Pitt, it ultimately falls short of its potential. The film suffers from a lackluster plot, a sluggish pace, and a missed opportunity to capitalize on the undeniable chemistry between its two leads. 'Wolfs' is a disappointment, despite its star power, and a reminder that even the most promising cast can't always save a movie from itself.
