Wolfs – a new something or other starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt – would like you to think it’s a thriller with a helping of comedy, though maybe a comedy with guns and guts. Whatever the case, it isn’t remotely tense or mysterious, and its modest thrills derive wholly from the spectacle of two beautifully aged, primped, pampered and expensive film stars going through the motions with winks and a degree of brittle charm. The movie is a trifle, and it knows it. Mostly, though, Wolfs, written and directed by Jon Watts, is an excuse for its two leads to riff on their own personas, which can be faintly amusing and certainly watchable but also insufferably smug. It’s insufferable a lot.

Clooney and Pitt play underworld fixers, the kind of misterioso professionals whom people with power and money hire to clean up their messes. Much like the character in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction played by Harvey Keitel – named Winston Wolfe but known as the Wolf – the fixers here swoop in and, with some elbow grease and a duffel bag large enough to hold a body, discreetly make the problem go away, or that’s the idea. Tarantino’s influence is conspicuous throughout Wolfs, most notably in its reams of self-aware dialogue, theatricality, casual violence and focus on characters talking to and at each other, including in a diner booth.

The fixers in Wolfs meet cute, as it were, early on when Pitt’s unnamed character interrupts Clooney’s mid-job inside a sprawling penthouse in a New York hotel. Since neither character has a name, it’s easier to refer to the actors playing them, which is very much to the movie’s meta-referential point. Clooney is tidying up a gruesome mess involving a local politician, Pam (a reliably appealing Amy Ryan). Faced with a potentially career-torpedoing situation – there’s blood and shattered glass on the floor, along with what may be the body of a dead male prostitute – Pam has speed-dialed a mysterious number hoping for help. Clooney comes to the rescue, and it’s on.

Pitt’s arrival baffles Clooney and adds to what becomes a messier, more dangerous problem. After some teasingly testy back and forth, the two settle into a wary partnership. Pam cleans up and splits as Clooney cleverly deals with her mess in between side-eyeing Pitt. (If you ever wanted to know how to unobtrusively move a body, this movie offers a helpful to-do list.) And then Pitt spies a backpack holding several bricks of drugs, and the cleanup becomes instantly far more complicated. It gets trickier still when the body turns out to be alive, and he flees into the night. Called the Kid (Austin Abrams), he looks a bit like Griffin Dunne in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, another nocturnal adventure that racks up mileage in downtown New York.

For the most part, it’s pleasant watching Clooney and Pitt grooving together, taking up the mantle of latter-day Newman and Redford. Clooney and Pitt have worked together before, most memorably in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s films, in which Clooney took the lead while Pitt happily played backup. Their ease with each other here is palpable. They look and sound nice and breezy, whether en route to more complications or trading insults with arched brows and faint smiles. There’s a theatrical quality to how Watts handles their face-offs, notably in the dialogue’s very written rhythms and in how he frames bodies in space. You’re watching seasoned pros sell some very familiar goods.

Is it enough for a movie? Sure. Old Hollywood produced plenty of films in which famous, beautiful people didn’t do much but show up and look enviably fabulous while entertaining you for 90 or so minutes, and sometimes that can be enough. In that regard, Wolfs is very much a throwback, even if it’s also a missed opportunity, and there are far too many moments when Pitt and Clooney seem entirely too self-satisfied with being, well, them. It’s worth noting that when Pam first calls Clooney, the contact number for him is represented by two square brackets – as in, [ ] – with nothing in between them. Initially, you would assume that Watts would fill in that empty space, perhaps with a mystery or some witty or trenchant observations about stardom. No dice.