At The Movies: Simple pleasures of crime caper Wolfs and family flick The Wild Robot
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Brad Pitt (left) and George Clooney in Wolfs.
PHOTO: APPLE TV+
Wolfs (NC16)
108 minutes, streaming on Apple TV+
★★★☆☆
The story: A prominent politician (Amy Ryan) is in a New York City hotel penthouse with a dead 20-something male, her tryst having gone scandalously wrong. George Clooney and Brad Pitt play rival fixers, two lone wolves forced into partnership when double-booked for the job of cleaning up the mess.
Clooney and Pitt’s characters in Wolfs are unnamed because why would Clooney and Pitt want to be known as anything other than Clooney and Pitt? “You two are the coolest guys I’ve ever seen,” envies a juvenile.
This is a cachet accrued over the actors’ three decades as Hollywood’s biggest stars and co-conspirators of the Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen franchise (2001 to 2007). Their first on-screen reunion since Burn After Reading (2008) is a frolicsome trifle to reaffirm their cool factor.
The American crime caper written and directed by Jon Watts of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Spider-Man trilogy (2017 to 2021) spans one long, twisty winter night in the city.
The fixers find a backpack of stolen heroin alongside the corpse. Then the semi-naked corpse they are disposing of comes alive as Austin Abrams (Euphoria, 2019 to present) and leads them on a chase through Chinatown, into an underworld conspiracy.
Abrams’ skittishness is an amusing foil for the pros, who are themselves smoothly entertaining in their bickering bromance.
Each brags that he is the best guy for the job.
The joke is, they are the same person in their egos, their black leather jackets and their age: Clooney is 63; Pitt, 60. The silver foxes are none the worse for wear despite their good-natured gags on backaches and reading glasses. They make it all look so effortless.
Hot take: Such is the star charisma of Clooney and Pitt, their buddy comedy is a pleasure without even needing to be a particularly good movie.
The Wild Robot (PG)
102 minutes, now showing
★★★☆☆
The story: An artificially intelligent robot shipwrecked on a wildlife island adapts to nature while fostering an orphaned gosling.
American animator Chris Sanders’ Academy Award-nominated adventures Lilo & Stitch (2002) and How To Train Your Dragon (2010) are about monsters.
The android of DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot is perceived as another, marooned among animals.
The Wild Robot features the voice of actress Lupita Nyong’o.
PHOTO: UIP
She is attacked by a moose, her circuitry raided by raccoons, when Rozzum unit 7134 – “but you may call me Roz” – is in fact a wondrous creation, thanks to Lupita Nyong’o’s beautiful voicing and the imagination of the beloved 2016 Peter Brown children’s novel which Sanders adapted.
To survive, Roz enters learning mode to communicate with the woodland inhabitants. Such is how she dissuades a sly red fox (Pedro Pascal) from eating a Canadian goose egg whose family she has accidentally crushed.
She is a robotic digital assistant. Raising the runt hatchling she names Brightbill (Kit Connor), teaching him to feed, swim and fly south for his winter migration, becomes her assumed task. More than that, it becomes her purpose.
Her misadventures are whimsical, and the community of cute characters includes an opossum matriarch (Catherine O’Hara), a goose elder (Bill Nighy) and a grizzly bear (Mark Hamill).
But here also is the compassion of The Iron Giant (1999), plus a message on climate change rendered in the detailed painterly visuals of Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki – the two superior movie influences – as Roz begins to experience a love her programming does not understand.
Her evolving emotional empathy shifts a Hollywood kiddie toon into an endearing tale on misfit families and self-determination.
Hot take: This is an uplifting mother goose fable of a different sort that builds to a tender heartbreaking close.
