These ‘Wolfs’ Don’t Bite

You won’t be howling over Wolfs, a subpar megawattage buddy action-comedy with grumpy glamourpuss Hollywood hunks and a rudimentary sense of after-hours mischief. Take Harvey Keitel’s fixer character Winston Wolfe from Pulp Fiction, double him, and then spend two hours milking the fact that these two Lone Wolf operators will never form a Wolf Pack. Except of course they will. Apple TV+ just ordered a sequel from writer-director Jon Watts, the auteur behind this agreeable but simplistic exercise in aggro charm, faux-byzantine underworld antics, and middle-age suavity.

WOLFS  ★★ (2/5 stars)
Directed by: Jon Watts
Written by: Jon Watts
Starring: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Amy Ryan, Austin Abrams, Pooma Jagannathan
Running time: 108 mins

“There’s only one man in the city who can do what you do,” says troubled Manhattan district attorney Margaret (Amy Ryan) when she calls Wolf #1 (George Clooney) on a snowy December night in a panic. The fetching MILF finds herself in a $10,000-a-night hotel penthouse suite with a bloodstained young man (Austin Abrams) lying on the floor—clad only in skivvies and tube socks. He fell backwards onto a bar cart, shattered the glass, and now his immobile frame threatens to derail her political career. The glum but no-nonsense Wolf #1 gives her all the fantasy-fixer commands you want to hear—he’ll clean up the mess, make the body disappear, cover her tracks—but then there’s a knock on her door. Enter Wolf #2 (Brad Pitt). Whaaa…?

Seems that the hotel proprietor, a mysterious unseen woman with long fingernails and a Dobermann, secretly sent him. Her name is Pamela (Frances McDormand’s voice), and Wolf #2 is her in-house help, a sort-of cross between a hotel detective and a black-ops agent. Pamela calls the suite and explains to Margaret that this new guy will be the one to work his magic—clean up the mess, make the body disappear, cover her tracks—and that both Wolfs need to go along to get along. 

Uh-oh. These guys work alone! So they both pout and snarl at each other in ways that should be more endearing than they are. Incidentally, the duo are accidental sartorial twins, basically wearing the same black leather jacket and nondescript slacks like they’re posh dads on casual Friday. Their “dumbass”/“dipshit” rapport gets tired fast, but these handsome man deliver their jabs with twinkles in their eyes. They send Margaret on her flustered way, then have a verbal pissing contest over who does the job better. 

That dynamic is the sustained premise of Wolfs, a star vehicle that lives and dies on how much or little you enjoy watching these two buttheads butt heads. By the way, these fixers only seem marginally good at their job—mainly because the young man, otherwise known as the Kid, isn’t dead. In fact, he isn’t even that bloody, despite that fact that Margaret got splayed with his blood. So they take him to a secret Chinatown doctor named June (Pooma Jagannathan) who patches him up well enough for the nearly naked Kid to make a clean getaway into the streets and onto the Brooklyn Bridge.

Complicating matters is the fact that the Wolfs discovered the Kid’s backpack in the suite containing four bricks of heroin worth $250,000. So Wolf #1 and Wolf #2 pull an all-nighter tracking down the Kid in an increasingly wintery cityscape and sussing out the drug kingpin who’ll want his goods delivered safely. Which crooks are responsible—is it the Albanians or the Croatians? Either Eastern European ethnicity will do, the movie revels in making them both stereotypically shady. 

One fatiguing goose chase follows another, as the Wolfs take the Kid through this misguided outer-borough adventure full of double-crosses, heartfelt confessionals, droll observations, shadowy figures names Dimitri and LeGrange, as well as increasingly heavy assault weapons. 

Other more inventive directors, like Steven Soderbergh and the Coen brothers, have used both actors—together and separately—in similar funny-violent situations to much greater effect. In their hands, Clooney and Pitt have shown range: they’ve played smart, played dumb, been good guys and bad guys, patsies and players. There’s a sense that Watts is running on those fumes, leaning into the shorthand accomplishments of these old-fashioned movie stars as they age gracefully into the back-nine of their careers. 

Watts, an amiable storyteller best known for the Tom Holland trilogy of Spider-Man movies, feels a bit out of his depth for this snappy dip into the seedier side of New York’s criminal misdeeds. Maybe the sequel will bring a sharper sense of purpose—smarter plot twists, slyer dialogue, higher stakes and maybe even a few elegiac notes. It’d be good to see a Wolfs with more bite.