There are no two megastars as charismatic as George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Having them play off each other with their dry wit and sardonic humor is something you have to watch to truly appreciate. We saw a glimpse of that 17 years ago with the Oceans Trilogy, and now, with Jon Watts’s “Wolfs,” we are offered round two. The title is, of course, a hat tip to Quentin Tarantino’s iconic character ‘The Wolf’ from Pulp Fiction, where Harvey Keitel starred as a fixer who you would call to get rid of a mess that can’t be gone without authorities getting involved.
In the 2024 film, Pitt and Clooney star as two unnamed fixers (they are only referred to as Pam’s Man and Margaret’s Man, respectively) who somehow end up getting assigned to the same job. District Attorney Margaret (Amy Ryan) makes a frantic call to the fixer, played by George Clooney after the young man she was partying with (known as “The Kid” and Austin Abrahams) dies in a luxury hotel suite. However, as the fixer is about to get to his job, another Wolf – this one played by Pitt shows up. Now, he wasn’t assigned to the job because of Margaret’s call but because of the surveillance footage that the hotel owner got from the camera in the room.
The dilemma now lies in the idea that these two wolves, who, as the name suggests and the metaphor goes, work alone, have to, in fact – work together. Expectedly, Pitt’s wolf has the upper hand because his client owns the hotel they are in. So, Clooney’s wolf is forced to do the job on his own as Pitt, disgruntling, looks at his face with judgemental eyes. Director Watts is not too eager to make sense of the silly plot or even cushion the plot progression in some suspense. So, he focuses entirely on drawing us closer to these characters without actually diving into their backstories.
This results in a lot of exposition; unknown and unfamiliar scenarios are dropped constantly, and we are either left with a complete sense of dissatisfaction or curiosity. This is both good and bad for the movie. For one, it allows us to really understand and dig into the lonely life of these two individuals who have made a working around getting out of sticky situations alive. So, it provides an extra edge to these otherwise goofy bafoons who just want the other to get out of their way as they do their thing.
However, the exposition also leaves you wanting the film to be a little deeper in a way that makes these characters whole. Since we are dropped headfirst into the scenario of the two of them uniting in the hotel room, we do not know what they have gone through in their life to get back aches when they bend to carefully administer the body away from the premises or why they are in those all-back fits with those cool looking leather jackets. Watts makes us aware that there is a world beyond the film that you will be hinted at about but never really shown. Now, that is a nice little trick right there, but for me, personally, the trick only works for the unconventional first act.
The second and third acts have pacing issues that only make the convoluted and half-baked nature of the story feel more prominent. Fear not; the chemistry between the two stars is pretty impressive, and it is enough to keep you hooked to this otherwise mid buddy-comedy that, once again, after only a few weeks of Apple TV+’s superior “The Instigators” puts two men teaming up with each other to fix a mess. However, if you’re taking my recommendation, the Matt Demon & Casey Affleck mess is far more entertaining than this one.
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