'Wolfs' Review

In Wolfs, both George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s characters go unnamed. It’s a requirement of the trade, both of them holding the title of “fixer,” someone you call when you’re in a jam and need help. A person who finds themself in this occupation needs to have a certain type of monasticism, explains Clooney’s character. They have no name, possessions, or past. They are a ghost… a lone wolf among a city full of sheep. The city in this scenario is New York, a familiar stomping ground for writer/director Jon Watts after his trilogy of MCU Spider-Man films. Here he finally gets to turn the brightness down and send some characters to the morgue, although that Marvel-y banter has stuck around in his DNA.

Prominent DA Margaret (Amy Ryan) is enjoying a night on the town. She picks up a young man (Austin Abrams) at the bar, gets a penthouse suite for the two of them, and starts drinking her troubles away. Except, new trouble arises when the man falls off the bed and crashes through the glass table, killing him. She can’t call the police, as the scandal would ruin her career. So, she calls the unnamed contact on her phone, with Clooney appearing at her door with assurances that he’ll make everything disappear. The swanky hotel fears a scandal just as much as Margaret does, which is why they send in their fixer (Pitt).

Just as it is annoying to find out that your Airbnb host double-booked you with another person during your weekend getaway, so is it for these two solitary professionals. But the only way to get the job done is to work together, a task that gets exponentially hard once drugs are discovered and the supposedly dead man suddenly wakes up.

A lot of the early pages in Watts’ script are meant for blowing smoke up the asses of the two fixers. Several speeches about how they are one of a kind and that no one can do what they do. Of course, that whole angle gets demolished pretty quickly as these two are pretty much a mirror of each other. They dress in the same slick black outfits, talk in the same confidently hushed tone, and have bad backs. One could surmise this ironic humor is meant for Pitt and Clooney just as much as it is for the characters. They’re two identical movie stars from the same generation who could easily swap roles without much difference in outcome. I’d guess that Clooney would have nailed Moneyball just as much as Pitt did, and vice versa for Gravity.

Luckily, the animosity and distrust between these two clones aren’t shared by Pitt and Clooney. Four movies together and a lifelong friendship go a long way to sell their instant chemistry here. The wisecracks and insults they share get tiring very quickly, but they always work on a basic level because of the infectious love the two of them have for each other. It’s Newman and Redford for the modern age, with some crime caper elements to keep the studio-mandated plot chugging along.

Everything Everywhere All at Once cinematographer Larkin Seiple makes this look good for a streaming film, which is a backhanded way of saying it doesn’t look like a pile of digital garbage. Yes, there is a car commercial sheen to this that cannot be ignored, but the smoky shadows and nighttime gloominess of late winter New York sell the intriguing underworld that these characters dabble in. Theodore Shapiro provides a lofi techno soundtrack that’ll go great with any study session.

None of this amounts to much of anything that will be memorable. I haven’t thought about it at all in the 24-hour gap between watching it and writing this review. It’s fun in the present and harnesses the power of movie stars in a time when that magic has steadily faded. For that, it gets a half-thumbs-up seal of approval.