Jon Watts (‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’) wrote and directed this New York-set action comedy, which will roll out on Apple TV+ after premiering in Venice.

Can movie stars stay cool forever?

More than a decade later, both stars are in their 60s and the movie business clearly isn’t what it used to be. Case in point: Wolfs, which was supposed to be released wide by Apple, will roll out for a one-week limited theatrical run 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 no longer flock to see films that aren’t based on existing IP? (Which begs another question: Are Pitt and Clooney themselves a form of existing IP?)

Both play “cleaners” or “fixers” — think Jean Reno in La Femme Nikita or Harvey Keitel, the first and most famous Wolf, in Pulp Fiction — who get hired for a job that winds up stretching out for one long, snowy and action-packed New York night. That job entails helping a district attorney (Amy Ryan) get rid of a dead body in her luxury hotel room, but it quickly spirals into much more. The body, in fact, is not dead at all, and belongs to a gabby, nervous wreck of a kid (Austin Abrams), who happens to be carrying four kilos of heroine in his book bag.

Pitt and Clooney (we’ll call them that since their characters have no names) both claim to be the best and only fixers in the city — lone wolves who excel at the impossible. Now they’ve been forced to work together, and you don’t have to have seen Bad Boys, 48 Hours, Lethal Weapon or a dozen other buddy action comedies to figure out that the two will go from being major antagonists to best pals, or at least frenemies.

Watts teases out the tension and humor between them in every scene, getting plenty of mileage off their slightest gestures or facial expressions, especially during a few sequences where there’s hardly any dialogue at all. Like in Cop Car, or his excellent TV series, The Old Man, the director has a knack for staging visual comedy and suspenseful set-pieces with only a few shots and cuts — the opposite of what most overshot action movies do.

But like Pitt and Clooney, none of these characters feels like real people. They’re occupants of a movie world closer to the ’90s-era meta-fictions of Tarantino than anything real or contemporary. Which means that whether they live or die, shoot one another or hug it up, finish as besties or arch enemies, doesn’t seem to matter all that much.

This is not to say that Pitt and Clooney don’t completely carry the film — they do it hands down from start to finish. But as cunning and well-made as Wolfs is, with its nonstop twists and sleek shoot ’em up sequences, perhaps there isn’t all that much to carry in the end.

As for the question at the top of this review, at one point the kid, who’s as nerdy a New Yorker as they come, tells Pitt and Clooney how cool they are. And it’s true they do some very cool things, like when Clooney bags a body in the hotel room in one quick swoop, brings it casually downstairs on a luggage rack and kicks it into the trunk of his Beemer. Even when, later on, he and Pitt have to simultaneously take out their old man reading glasses, they seem cool as cucumbers.