Written and Directed by Jon Watts | 108 min | ▲▲▲△△ | Apple TV+
Amy Ryan’s Margaret, a District Attorney, has a big problem. There’s a dead guy in her swanky New York hotel room. She has a number she was given for absolute emergencies, someone she should call only if she’s in desperate need. The guy is George Clooney. You could think of him as his character, this fixer, but he doesn’t have a name so he might as well be Clooney. Or the title character from Michael Clayton, a movie that starts very similarly to this one, with Clooney showing up for a wealthy client who pays for specialized help.
It’s all very serious until Brad Pitt shows up. You could think of him as his character, this fixer, but he doesn’t have a name so he might as well be Pitt. That’s when this production starts to get very schticky, indeed.
Everyone knows Pitt and Clooney are chums and worked together on the Oceans movies with Steven Soderbergh, but writer-director Jon Watts is no Soderbergh — even after three wildly successful Spider-Man movies, which certainly got him this gig, Soderbergh’s in a different league. The direction here is slick, but in the script we get a whole lot of buddy-buddy (or Buddy Buddy) humour that just lies there — this is an action comedy with not a lot of action and not a lot of humour.
The real problem is right there in the title — their characters are basically the same guy. A movie like this tends to work best as a riff on The Odd Couple, with mismatched chums, The Midnight Run or Running Scared (1986) model. I kept thinking about what this would’ve been like with Dwayne The Rock Johnson or Karen Gillan or Jack Black or Kevin Hart — basically any of the cast of Jumanji — in one of these roles, someone with real comic timing to bring a lighter touch. And despite a saltiness in the language suggesting an R-rating, the movie’s nowhere near violent enough to feel profound.
Still, this is Pitt and Clooney. Either of them could carry this kind of picture in their sleep on their own, and together there’s an undeniable charisma, especially when they start to get along, when it stops being a play on outdated notions of masculinity. I mean, it never entirely stops being that, but the arrival of Austin Abrams as The Kid helps. He’s someone carrying a lot of millennial charm and drugs important to the plot.
Also, the injection of Sade and Phil Collins on the soundtrack brings a welcome ’80s vibe that papers over a few issues. The production values are A+ from the gradual accumulation of (real looking) snow over the course of a single New York night to the glowing cinematography and evocative locations to Frances McDormand’s voice over the phone, the professionalism isn’t just in the story it’s in the making. And the dollop of Butch and Sundance in the finale works well enough — who are Clooney and Pitt in 2024 if not Hollywood’s Newman and Redford?
