Brad Pitt and George Clooney in a light and clever action film

Can movie stars stay cool forever?

This seems to be the great existential question that underlies the intelligent, impeccably directed, if rather flimsy action comedy. Wolvesreuniting Brad Pitt and George Clooney, who memorably became friends in of the ocean trilogy. At the time they were two of the greatest actors on the planet, and even an effort like that of the Coen brothers Burn after reading — which marked their last on-screen collaboration — grossed more than $160 million, while remaining entirely unconventional and frankly uncommercial.

More than a decade later, both stars are in their 60s and the world of cinema is no longer what it once was. A concrete example: Wolvesthat was supposed to be widely distributed by Apple, will have a limited theatrical release before going straight to streaming. Is it because Pitt and Clooney can no longer draw the crowds they did in their heyday? Or is it because Americans are no longer flocking to movies that aren’t based on existing IP? (Which raises another question: Are Pitt and Clooney themselves a form of existing IP?)

In any case it's a shame, because Wolves is a work that deserves attention on the big screen, rather than being watched in bed on a MacBook propped up on your crotch. Written and directed by Jon Watts, who, after a long interlude in the Marvel Universe, returns to the heist mode of his 2015 hit film Police carThe film has twists and turns galore and displays a sly, deadpan style that is rarely seen in Hollywood these days. Funny and subtle at the same time, it's not really about much in the end, other than the idea of ​​reuniting Pitt and Clooney to see if they still have their magic, which they mostly do.

Both play the role of “cleaners” or “fixers” — think of Jean Reno in The woman Nikita or Harvey Keitel, the first and most famous Wolf, in pulp Fiction —who are hired for a job that ends up lasting one long, snowy, and eventful New York night. That job involves helping a district attorney (Amy Ryan) dispose of a dead body in her luxury hotel room, but it quickly turns into much more. The body, in fact, isn’t dead at all, and belongs to a chatty, nervous teenager (Austin Abrams), who just happens to be carrying four kilos of heroin in his book bag.

Pitt and Clooney (we'll call them that because their characters don't have names) both claim to be the city's best and only fixers, lone wolves who excel at the impossible. Now they've been forced to work together, and you don't have to have seen it. Bad Boys, 48 hours, Lethal weapon or a dozen other buddy action comedies to figure out that these two will go from being great antagonists to best friends, or at least frenemies.

Watts brings out the tension and humor between them in every scene, getting a lot of it from their smallest gestures or facial expressions, especially during some sequences where there is almost no dialogue. As in Police caror his excellent TV series, The Old ManThe director has a knack for crafting visual comedy and action with just a few shots and cuts, the opposite of what most over-the-top action films do.

In his best moments, Wolves takes this style to the extreme, in what is essentially a two-person film set on many deserted Manhattan streets, or inside Clooney's comfortable BMW. A few other characters are introduced, including the aforementioned “kid,” a doctor (Poorna Jagannathan) who works at a Chinatown restaurant, and an Albanian mob boss (Zlatko Burić) whose daughter's wedding the two crash in an over-the-top scene.

But like Pitt and Clooney, none of these characters feel like real people. They are occupants of a cinematic world closer to Tarantino’s ’90s meta-fiction than anything real or contemporary. Which is to say, whether they live or die, whether they shoot each other or hug each other, whether they end up as best friends or bitter enemies, doesn’t seem to matter all that much.

That's not to say that Pitt and Clooney aren't completely up to par with the film: they are hands down from start to finish. But as clever and well-crafted as they are Wolves is that, with its non-stop twists and turns and its elegant shooting sequences, perhaps there isn't much to tell in the end.

As for the question at the top of this review, at one point the guy, who is a New York nerdy as can be, tells Pitt and Clooney how cool they are. And they do some really cool things, like when Clooney picks up a dead body in the hotel room in one fell swoop, casually carries it down the stairs on a luggage rack, and throws it in the trunk of his Beemer. Even when, later, he and Pitt have to dig out their old reading glasses at the same time, they look cool as cucumbers.

But does everyone still think that? If you asked a random group of teenagers or twenty-somethings today, they probably wouldn't even know who the actors were or what movies they made. And they probably don't watch many movies anymore, if they ever did.

And so if Wolves is about something, perhaps it's about testing whether Hollywood stars wield the same power and allure they did when movies seemed to be of much greater interest to the general public. The results of that test have yet to be known, and Wolves leaves us with a final image of Pitt and Clooney suspended in action together, as if to say: if they no longer have us, at least they have each other.