A pair of lone wolf professional fixers must begrudgingly cooperate to dispose of a body in Wolfs, which debuted at the Venice International Film Festival last month, a few weeks ahead of its release on Apple TV+. This lightweight thriller-comedy from writer-director Jon Watts (who helmed the MCU Spider-Man trilogy) only reaches a mild simmer, but a pair of engaging turns from its stars keep it watchable throughout.
George Clooney and Brad Pitt are those two stars, reunited on screen for the first time since the Ocean’s trilogy (though they also shared a memorable single scene in Burn After Reading), and it’s their breezy chemistry that keeps Wolfs afloat. Gene Siskel Test: is this movie more interesting than watching Clooney and Pitt have dinner? Probably not, but it’s low-key enough to reasonably pass for that experience.
It isn’t Clooney or Pitt but rather Amy Ryan who opens Wolfs and serves as its catalyst: she plays Margaret, a Manhattan District Attorney who panics when the young man (Austin Abrams) she was having some fun with winds up dead on the floor of her hotel room. A scandal would ruin her career, so she dials a number she was given by a friend, and finds herself talking to a professional fixer (Clooney) who quickly makes his way to the scene.
Margaret and her fixer barely get to know each other before they get an unexpected surprise: a knock at the door. It’s not housekeeping: it’s another professional fixer (Pitt). He’s been hired by the hotel, an exclusive venue for elite guests that also cannot afford to be involved in scandal, and has been monitoring Margaret’s room on hidden camera.
We’re at an impasse: Margaret doesn’t know if she can trust the hotel, and the hotel (represented over the phone by Pam, voiced by Frances McDormand) doesn’t know if they can trust the man she has hired. So an uneasy alliance is formed, and this one time only, these two lone wolfs will work together to dispose of a body… if an undisclosed drug deal involving the Croatian mafia doesn’t get in the way.
In Wolfs, Clooney and Pitt are playing the kind of lone wolf fixers that Harvey Keitel so memorably portrayed in Pulp Fiction. The film’s title, intentionally not the grammatically correct Wolves, underscores their isolated existence. There is, of course, nothing cooler than being a lone wolf… except at the wolf picnic, when you don’t have a partner for the wolf wheelbarrow race.
Will the characters played by Clooney and Pitt, at each other’s throats for the majority of the film, ultimately turn on each other? Or will they eventually discover the merits of having a wolf partner? While the opening with Ryan is strong enough to immediately grab our attention, Wolfs is so breezy from introduction of the fixer characters that there’s little doubt which way the narrative will fall.
A better film would have taken its serious setup more sincerely, while still maintaining a sense of knowing dark humor about the world it portrays. That better film exists in the form of David Fincher‘s The Killer, which provided riotous black humor for the audience while allowing its central hitman to fully inhabit his own impossibly self-serious world.
In Wolfs, the main characters are in on the joke alongside the audience. That makes it very difficult for us to invest much in its storyline, or care about its characters. But we care about Clooney and Pitt, who are effortlessly entertaining in these roles and seem to be having a great time. Sometimes that’s enough, at least for a mild recommendation.
2 Responses
Hi George Clooney and Brad Pitt my name is Maggie Gould and I am your fan and I have Ocean’s 11,12,13. Anyways I can not wait to watch this amazing movie of yours it sounds like a lot of fun to watch. And also I can wait for ocean’s 14 I am just letting you know that now. I have an idea for ocean’s 15 movie coned by loved. What did you guys think? Thanks Maggie Gould
Incredibly disappointing. Starts off intriguing, great star power and performances, and then goes nowhere for 100 minutes. Woof