My Two Dads: The Movie, Wolfs deserves credit for putting in the work and making the most of a casting/premise combo that could have coasted on those two factors alone. George Clooney and Brad Pitt play “fixers”—think Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction—who always work alone. Then one night they’re each called to a luxury hotel to take care of the same corpse. What follows is no Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve, or Thirteen (let alone Burn After Reading), but writer-director Jon Watts (Spider-Man: Homecoming) employs clever framing, blocking, and witty camerawork in the opening hotel section to accentuate the comic suspicion and jealousy between the two characters. (Really, there’s a lot of fun with door frames.) Clooney and Pitt, meanwhile, reward these efforts with invested performances that never once lean on knowing smirks (a few too many bad-back jokes aside). Once Wolfs leaves the hotel the charm begins to thin (though Austin Abrams has a giddily dizzy monologue as a third wheel they pick up along the way), while a last-act attempt to inject a moral dilemma into the proceedings feels false. Yet for a dad—and, let’s face it, mom—movie, Wolfs could have been way worse.
(9/26/2024)
