WOLFS - Mark Reviews Movies

Wolfs, Apple Original Films / Columbia Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 19, 2024

Wolfs depends so much on the presence of its lead actors that one starts to wonder which came first: the final script or the casting. Writer/director Jon Watts has come up with a fairly clever idea, in which two competing underworld clean-up men are forced to work together to dispose of a tricky problem. That problem, by the way, is the body of a young man who died in a hotel room with a prominent New York City politician.

The lengthy opening scene here is easily the movie's best. Perhaps that's because it's introducing us to the assorted conflicts and complications at hand, before it becomes obvious that Watts isn't sure how to pay them off except in the easiest, most formulaic ways possible.

It also helps that it possesses someone for its leading men, George Clooney and Brad Pitt, to play against, before their characters are stuck, ostensibly alone, together for the rest of the time. They're so similar in personality, attitude, and behavior that there's not really much distinction of character that drives their constant bickering.

The third player is Margaret, the aforementioned politician, who met the young man in a fancy hotel where she was drinking, invited him up to a room she paid for under an alias, and watched as he accidentally did a bellyflop onto a glass bar cart. Amy Ryan plays the politician, just able to make some important decisions amidst the genuine shock of witnessing someone die and knowing that her life and career hang in the balance. It's an actual character and performance amidst a movie that quickly becomes about types and repeating the same jokey behavior over and over again.

Her one phone call is to a mystery number, given to her by someone she trusts and only meant to be used in extreme situations that require an extra level of discretion. The man who eventually returns her call is played by Clooney, and since his character—as well as his counterpart—never reveals his name, we'll call him Man 1. We could just call him Clooney, really, since the extent of his characterization amounts to the easy charm, unflappable demeanor, and sense of calm cool that has defined the actor's screen persona for decades. Man 1 is easy enough and slightly less confusing, though.

Anyway, Man 1 is all set to remove the body from the hotel room and do whatever it is he does with human-sized problems, and then, there's a knock at the door. Another man, played by Pitt, enters, announcing that he's also here to take care of Margaret's problem. He was sent by the hotel's owner (voiced by Frances McDormand), who doesn't want her new hotel to have the stain of a potentially high-profile scandal attached to it.

Man 2, as we'll refer to him, wants to take over. Again, we could just call the guy Pitt, because his character is charming and cool with the slight edge of snark. Then again, Clooney's man has that hint of sarcasm to him, too, so maybe the distinction isn't really much of one.

Over the course of the night, the two professional fixers have to get the body out of the room and get rid of it. Well, that's the original plan, until Man 2 finds some bricks of heroin, which the dead guy was carrying, so now, the two clean-up men have to figure out whose drugs they are and how to return/deliver them without causing more issues.

They'll get some help in that department, because it turns out the dead body, known only as Kid (Austin Abrams), isn't as dead as Man 1 or Man 2 assumed. He's quite alive, in fact, and very freaked out about waking up in the trunk of a car.

The plotting here, like the characters, is as basic as it can be. Indeed, one could argue that, like the characters, there isn't actually a plot to be found here. Man 1 and Man 2 just kind of improvise, getting medical attention for Kid from June (Poorna Jagannathan)—for whom both men have a lot of admiration and affection, leading to some sideways glances when they realize she knows both of them—and figuring out where he was supposed to deliver the heroin. This leads to a few setpieces, including a chase through Chinatown and beyond, crashing a wedding reception where the two men can't be seen together because a Croatian mobster might kill them, and a climactic shootout where the more important scene might be happening off-camera.

Those might be full extent of the both the action and the plot, actually, which might be fine if Watts had actually given us characters and conversations of worth outside of them. Instead, the whole of Wolfs depends on the combined charisma of Clooney and Pitt, as their characters argue and banter and gradually form a mutual but begrudging respect for each other. The star power may be considerable, but that does not automatically make for a satisfying movie. It definitely doesn't here.

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