Amy Ryan, Austin Abrams, Brad Pitt, comedy, drama, film festivals, George Clooney, Jon Watts, movies, reviews, Wolfs, Zlatko Buric
September 22, 2024
by Carla Hay
Directed by Jon Watts
Culture Representation: Taking place in New York City, the comedy/drama film “Wolfs” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few Asians) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: Two fixers compete over who’s better at covering up the same scandal.
Culture Audience: “Wolfs” will appeal mainly to people who are fans of stars George Clooney and Brad Pitt and movies about dirty dealings that aren’t as edgy and smart as they try to appear to be.
Wolfs is like a sheep in wolf’s clothing. It’s a boring and derivative dark comedy with George Clooney and Brad Pitt as rival fixers who repeatedly snipe, scowl, and smirk though a weak and bland plot about a scandalous hotel tryst and stolen heroin. The movie tries very hard to make these two fixers seem like dangerous underworld characters, but the performances of Clooney and Pitt fail to convince. These two actors just look like exactly what they are during this entire movie: overpaid, privileged movie stars just going through the motions while doing an unimaginative movie.
Written and directed by Jon Watts, “Wolfs” had its world premiere at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. The movie, which takes place and was filmed on location in New York City, starts off as a potentially intriguing story. The opening scene shows the Manhattan skyline at night and then zooms in on an upscale hotel, where there’s the sound of glass breaking and a woman screaming in horror.
Viewers eventually find out what happened: A divorced, middle-aged district attorney named Margaret (played by Amy Ryan) was sexually hooking up with an unnamed guy (played by Austin Abrams), who’s young enough to be her son, in the hotel suite she had rented for the night. The guy, who is identified in the film’s end credits as Kid, is an undergraduate college student in his late teens or early 20s, who met Margaret at the hotel bar and accepted her invitation to “hang out” with her in her hotel suite.
While jumping up and down on the bed, Kid fell backward and right into a portable glass bar table. He’s bloody and presumed to be dead. In a panic, Margaret calls an unnamed “fixer” (played by Clooney), based on a referral. Margaret tells this fixer (who is identified as Margaret’s Man in the film’s end credits) that an unidentified man she knows gave her this phone number to call if she ever needed serious help.
Margaret’s Man is suspicious and asks her multiple times how she got his phone number. Margaret then seems to say the magic words because she tells this fixer: “He said to say there’s only one man in the city who can do what you do.” And just like a password unlocking a portal, the fixer changes his wary attitude and is convinced he can trust Margaret.
He hears what Margaret’s problem is and calmly assures her: “Everything is going to be fine.” He also orders her not to touch anything and wait for him to arrive at her hotel suite. When he arrives, he finds a nervous Margaret, who tells him that she can’t be connected to this scandal because she’s a district attorney. Margaret’s Man talks to her about establishing an alibi. They agree that she should go home and pretend she was with her teenage daughter all night.
Margaret denies that this unnamed young man in the suite is a prostitute. It’s used as a weird running joke in the movie, where various people assume that Kid is a sex worker and someone replies, “He’s not a prostitute.” This “joke,” which really is pointless and silly, gets tiresome very quickly. Because really: Even if this guy were a sex worker, the bigger problem is that he could be seriously injured or dead.
Just as Margaret’s Man fixer is about to start cleaning up and disposing of the body, another fixer shows up who is there for the same reason. This other fixer is identified in the end credits as Pam’s Man (played by Pitt) because he works for Pamela Dowd, the owner of this fairly new hotel. Margaret’s Man and Margaret find out that the hotel has a hidden video camera in the suite (which is totally illegal surveillance and one of the many stupid plot twists in the movie), and Pamela was alerted about this tryst gone wrong that was recorded by the hidden camera.
Pamela gets on the phone and tells Margaret’s Man that her fixer will take care of the problem because she’s going to do whatever is necessary to preserve the reputation of the hotel by covering up this scandal. Even though Margaret’s Man points out this illegal surveillance is a felony (and whatever was recorded probably wouldn’t be admissible evidence in court because the video is an illegal recording), Pamela ignores Margaret’s Man insistence that he should be the one to do the job. Pam’s Man immediately tries to make Margaret’s Man feel like an interloper, while Margaret’s Man tries to make Pam’s Man feel like an amateur
Margaret suggests that these two fixers work together. The two fixers reject the idea. They immediately despise each other in such a stereotypical way, if “Wolfs” hadn’t been such a hollow display of macho heterosexual posturing between these two fixers, then you could easily think that this “instant dislike” for each other might turn this movie into gay romantic comedy. And so begins a tedious back-and-forth egotistical battle between Margaret’s Man and Pam’s Man to prove who’s the better fixer.
Margaret has already gone home when Margaret’s Man and Pam’s Man find out there’s going to be more to this situation than cleaning up the room and getting rid of evidence, including Kid’s body. The two fixers find out that Kid has some bricks of heroin in his backpack. The fixers immediately deduce that whoever owns the heroin will come looking for it, so it’s better to find that person and give back the heroin.
It’s all just a silly excuse to prolong the movie with time-wasting detours. The trailer for “Wolfs” already reveals that Kid really isn’t dead. He becomes an annoying third wheel who gets caught between the bickering between these two smug fixers.
Margaret’s Man is supposed to be the ice-cold fixer, who thinks he’s superior because he has more experience and more underworld connections. Pam’s Man is supposed to be the wisecracking fixer, who thinks he’s superior because he’s in better physical shape and more skilled at new technology. It’s really just Clooney and Pitt do pale imitations of their characters in the “Ocean’s” movie franchise.
As for Abrams, because of his physical resemblance to Timothée Chalamet, he will get inevitable comparisons to Chalamet, who has more acting range. Abrams isn’t terrible in his “Wolfs” role, but he gives the type of performance that never lets people forget that he’s acting. “Wolfs” looks like a movie that Chalamet probably rejected, so the “Wolfs” filmmakers decided to go with a Chalamet look-alike.
The dialogue in “Wolfs” is often irritating and very artificial-sounding. Nowhere is this more evident than in a self-pitying monologue that Kid spews out in the middle of the movie. There are the typical scenes of bumbling criminals, gun fights and car chases that don’t do anything clever but just play out in a predictable manner.
Zlatko Buric has a small role as a Croatian gangster named Dimitri, who has a run-in with Margaret’s Man and Pam’s Man when the two fixers crash the wedding of Dimitri’s daughter. In an effort to hide from Dimitri, the two fixers try to blend in during a group circle dance. It looks as ridiculous as it sounds.
“Wolfs” has eye-catching cinematography but it can’t make up for such a lackluster story. Women in this shallow movie are background characters or disappear quickly. People who want to see Clooney and Pitt co-star in a more entertaining movie are better off watching “Ocean’s Eleven.”
Apple Studios released “Wolfs” in select U.S. cinemas on September 20, 2024. Apple TV+ will premiere the movie on September 27, 2024.