Summary
Wolfs is a simple throwback that burns movie star charisma for fuel. It’s a good time and isn’t interested in being anything else.
I know what you’re thinking. The correct plural of “wolf” is “wolves”. But that’s kind of the point of Wolfs, the Jon Watts movie streaming on Apple TV+ that reunites George Clooney and Brad Pitt for the first time in a decade. They’re lone wolves who work alone until they’re forced to work together.
It’s not a great joke, admittedly. But it sets the tone for a movie like this, which is largely a laidback self-aware comedy about a couple of aging movie stars that wears the clothes of a thriller.
Watts directed Tom Holland’s Spider-Man MCU trilogy – Homecoming, Far From Home, and No Way Home – but you’d never be able to tell. Wolfs is determinedly the opposite of a spectacle blockbuster. If it weren’t for the cast and possibly one shootout this would be closer to an indie art film, a Mumblecore drama where two actors bicker for nearly two hours and nobody quite understands why.
To be fair, the plot here – Watts also wrote the screenplay – hinges on the Clooney and Pitt characters not quite understanding what’s going on either. Both are nameless; they’re credited as Margaret’s Man and Pam’s Man, but the joke is that they’re essentially the same person, and the other, more meta joke is that they’re George Clooney and Brad Pitt.
Both are fixers, the kind of men who turn up to crime scenes in leather jackets and turtlenecks and make things – dead bodies, drugs, guns, money, etc. – disappear. Clooney is called to the penthouse suite of a swanky New York hotel one night by a frantic district attorney named Margaret (Amy Ryan), who requires his services to dispose of the dead twenty-something she invited into her room on a whim.
Margaret insists the dead guy’s not a prostitute. And his death was just an accident. Either way, though, she’d rather he disappeared. Clooney insists he’s the only man in the city who can make that happen, but another one arrives at the door five minutes later to do the same job. It turns out the hotel’s owner – she’s voiced by Frances McDormand, but we only see her long fingernails – has a hidden camera installed in the penthouse. She, too, would like to make the problem disappear so it doesn’t become a business hindrance. She sends her own guy. He’s the only man in the city who can make it happen.
You can see why Clooney and Pitt don’t get on. Each fancies themselves the “real” version of the other. As the two discover that the dead guy had four kilos of heroin in his rucksack and then that he isn’t actually a dead guy at all, they’re dragged all over the city through a litany of unknowingly shared contacts and associates in an effort to figure out who the drugs belong to and what they might be prepared to do to get them back.
Wolfs is built entirely and exaggeratedly on charisma. There’s really very little else to it, which isn’t as much of a criticism as you’d think. Clooney and Pitt are proper movie stars, and it’s a real pleasure to watch them be that with each other. Their back-and-forth is reliably funny and when they have cause to offer something a little more dramatic – which, to be fair, isn’t often – they’re more than capable.
I, for one, am happy that Wolfs asks very little of its audience. It doesn’t even expect them to keep track of the increasingly knotty ways that certain plot elements intersect, since that’s not really the point. This is the kind of throwback movie that deliberately evokes the classics – how many “one long night in New York” movies can you think of? – and burns old-school movie star charisma for fuel. It’s a good time, and that’s all it needs to be.
