Wolfs (2024)

Direction: Jon Watts
Country: USA

Inspired by his admiration for solitary anti-heroes in films such as Le Samourai (1967), Ghost Dog (1999), and Collateral (2004), director Jon Watts sets up a New York crime story in Wolfs, but most of it feels worn-out and lackluster. This film reunites Brad Pitt and George Clooney, who portray experienced crime scene cleaners having extreme difficulties teaming up as requested by their clients. 

The film’s intriguing opening is engaging but it quickly unravels, descending into shallow banter, self-mockery (mostly revolving around aging), and formulaic action scenes toward oblivion. Though it initially seems to channel Coen Brothers’ dark, quirky tone, it takes a wrong turn, injecting syrupy moments that come off as laughably ridiculous and will likely irritate genre fans.

Wolfs is clumsy, overly formulaic, and incompetently lazy, following a banal, unoriginal plot weighed down by cheesy dialogue and underbaked story elements. Lacking any type of genius, it’s a waste of talent and energy on all levels.

Babylon (2022)

Direction: Damien Chazelle
Country: USA 

Suffused in eccentricity and delusional grandeur, Babylon is a product of writer-director Damien Chazelle’s creativity. The film, working both as a love letter to cinema and a fierce disapproval of its excesses, is the result of 15 years of research, conveying an unrefined, buffoonish vision of the transition from silent to sound film in the late ’20s. 

Shot in anamorphic format (35 mm), this technically stunning exertion boasts a curious, rambunctious point of departure, but Chazelle's intentions and energy slowly rots along the way, taking the audience to exhaustion well before the end. The director of Whiplash (2014) and La La Land (2016) is more interested in shocking than providing a finely structured story. His complacent Hollywood pastiche flirts with sparkling euphoria and wild scenarios, taking good advantage of feverish jazz music and staging intensity. But if the surface shines here and there, then the interior borders the grotesque. 

Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and the charismatic Diego Calva are not responsible for the failure of a movie that competes and loses against the sweetness and elegance of Spielberg’s The Fabelmans. It’s also a weirder and more mundane beast than Ostlund’s ostentatious satire The Triangle of Sadness (a rival for the best puking moments); and a less clever, more pompous option than Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. There’s nothing personal or profound in this messy imagination of the early movies; it’s just a spectacle reduced to tics and gimmicks.

Bullet Train (2022)

Direction: David Leitch
Country: USA 

Based on the novel Maria Beetle by Japanese writer Kôtarô Isaka, Bullet Train marks the eighth collaboration between director David Leitch and actor Brad Pitt, who first worked together in Fight Club (1999). The story follows five assassins on mission on a high-speed train from Tokyo to Kyoto. Their goals, despite varied, are interrelated.

Imbued with cartoonish spirit, this indigestible fast-food-type of action-comedy tries to strike the eye with acrobatic moves but quickly sinks deep into labyrinthine involvements and the mistaken idea that ‘the more the stupidity, the more you laugh’. Leitch nods to Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie, without equaling them, in an inconsistently unfunny exercise that shows emptiness of mind. The stunts, inspired by the slapstick comedy of Jackie Chan, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, are mostly dull, and the unattractive scenario is filled with thin characters, including a risible appearance by Sandra Bullock in the final minutes. 

Ineffectively blending different cultures to make a concoction of Japanese yakuza and manga styles, Mexican fury à-la Robert Rodriguez, an American stroke of nonsensical serendipity, and British Trainspotting-like tantrum, the film fails to drum up any kind of interest. I ended up asking myself what was more vexing in this film: the allusions to popular culture, the crass hypocrisy of an overworked plot, or the phony action sequences.