Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jon Watts
Starring: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Austin Abrams, Amy Ryan, Poorna Jagannathan
Back in the day, if American movie stars wanted to make a quick buck
they would jet off to Japan and shoot a commercial, safe in the
knowledge that a western audience would never see the results and their
screen cred would remain intact. Thanks to the internet, Hollywood stars
can't do anything in secret anymore, so the Japanese aftershave
commercial has been replaced by movies like Wolfs, movies that head straight to streaming on a Friday and will be
forgotten about by Sunday. Nobody will judge Brad Pitt or George Clooney's careers by the quality or lack
thereof of a movie like Wolfs. It's a free hit. Easy money. Clooney can put a few million aside for
his inevitable political campaign and Pitt can stash it away for the
fateful day when Angelina Jolie comes across Ronan Farrow's business
card while cleaning out her handbag. Everyone's a winner. Everyone
except the audience, that is.
A "wolf" in this context is a fixer, which like a hitman, is one of
those shady figures that may or may not exist in reality but which we
suspect most rich people have access to when the need arises. Think of a
cross between Clooney's Michael Clayton and Harvey Keitel's Winston
Wolfe, professionals who swoop in to change the sheets when a wealthy
person shits the bed.
Clooney's fixer Jack is called to a New York hotel room where District
Attorney Margaret (Amy Ryan) has gotten herself in a bit of a
pickle. After taking a young man (Austin Abrams) to her room, he
now lies dead on the floor having overdosed on drugs. Minutes after
Jack's arrival he's joined by rival fixer Nick (Pitt), who works for the
hotel, which has hidden cameras operating in every room in preparation
for such snafus. Forced to reluctantly work together, things get messier
for Jack and Nick when they find the dead kid's backpack, filled with a
considerable amount of white powder.
With the narrative playing out from dusk until dawn, Wolfs is a throwback to the "one crazy night" formula that birthed so
many cult gems in the '70s and '80s. Jack and Nick spend the late night
and early morning traversing NYC and getting into various scrapes, but
as they make their way through the familiar backdrop of the Big Apple we
find ourselves pining for past classics like After Hours and The Warriors, and when they end up in a diner at dawn you'll find yourself
straining to figure out if it's the same one Scorsese used in Goodfellas (you know, the one with the dolly zoom).
When a third party is added to the mix in the film's second
half, Wolfs becomes something of a riff on Hal Ashby's The Last Detail as Jack and Nick face a moral dilemma regarding how to dispose of
this third wheel. For a brief moment we're teased a more interesting,
less hokey version of Wolfs that features the melancholy of Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky. But writer/director Jon Watts has no such heady
intentions. He simply wants to make a knockabout caper, which is
perfectly fine, but he lacks a gift for comic writing. The dialogue is
largely of the smartass sub-Tarantino variety, though it benefits to
some degree from Pitt and Clooney's experience. For a bickering buddy
movie of this sort to work you have to believe that the two parties have
a genuine initial animosity for one another (think of Nick Nolte and
Eddie Murphy in 48 Hrs or Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin in Midnight Express), but Pitt and Clooney share the comfortable rapport of two men who
clearly have attended a lot of the same weddings.
Watts revitalised the Marvel Cinematic Universe by injecting some
youthful energy with his Spider-Man movies, so it's ironic to see him in
the business of thespian taxidermy here with a pair of past their prime
stars. Watching Pitt and Clooney struggle to bring life to dialogue that
has all the flavour of a communion wafer is like if Dean Martin and
Jerry Lewis were still doing their double act in 1973, or if the
Gallagher brothers reunited for an Oasis concert tour in 2025. There are
jokes about the duo's failing eyesight and their creaky backs, but the
big joke is on us for continuing to accept Hollywood's reheated
meals.
Wolfs is on Apple TV+ from
September 27th.
