Wolfs (2024)

Synopsis

English major here. Why is it called Wolfs and not Wolves? After all, there are two of them, and that’s the proper plural. Ah well, set it aside for now.

We start in pitch black, and hysterical profanity: District Attorney Margaret (Amy Ryan) is in a panic. She’s in a swanky New York City hotel room with a guy who is very young, and very dead. She happens to have a number, given to her by a friend, for a fixer who specializes in making all traces of career-ending messes like this disappear. Margaret’s Man (George Clooney) shows up and begins his process. But then a second fixer shows up, who gets called Pam’s Man (Brad Pitt). Just how this happens is a small but nifty detail you can discover for yourselves.

Clooney is the older veteran, proud of his status as the only guy in town who can fix this type of situation. Pitt is the cooler, younger version who also thinks he’s the only guy in town in this business. Clooney thinks Pitt must be an untalented pretender. Pitt is skeptical of what he figures is Clooney’s outdated, old school methods. Oil and water. Night and day. Fire and ice. They don’t like each other, but both are too professional, and proud, to back down and leave it to other guy. And once they discover the kid was carrying pounds of ultra expensive, ultra pure drugs, they not only have a body to somehow spirit out of the hotel but a puzzle to figure out: how to get the drugs back to their “rightful” owner without attracting the attention of some crime boss who will make them dead as well.

As you can imagine, this is just the start of the obstacles they’ll need to hurdle on this cold, snowy New York City night. Clooney and Pitt become reluctant partners as they try to cover their tracks, sort out through the complications, and slowly peel back the clues that reveal how they have more in common than they’d have liked.

See It

Pure fun. Clooney and Pitt are charming and likable, each in his own way. We root for them, even though they’re bad guys who, in a perfectly moral universe, we should not admire. They’re comfortable in their characters, each sublimely calibrated to his own scruffy persona. As they finally puzzle through what really brought them together, writer/director Jon Watts had the good sense not to destroy the vibe by turning this into a mushy, all-out buddy movie.

At the expense of spoiling what is actually not much of a surprise, mention must also be made of Austin Abrams as The Kid. Oh gosh, that scene where he explains how he got into that mess: just an amazing, breathless, full-throttle one-take. And then there’s all the running through hallways, a closed mall, and snowy NYC streets. In his undies.

So many small, mirth-invoking moments along the way. One example: A pager goes off that will show an address Clooney and Pitt desperately need. They both have to get out their glasses to have a look. And some genuine tension. In a movie like this, we expect that the bad guy isn’t going to pull that trigger. Or is he? The performance and the direction leads us to doubt it. Well done.

Wolfs stops short of a perfect score due to a few annoying distractions, such as the wedding party where Clooney and Pitt get trapped in a dance routine. And the ending in the morning at the diner, where our two fixers parse through what’s really going on. One suspects the dialog flew by at an accelerated clip to deflect our attention from the fact that none of it would make sense even as a string of coincidences, let alone as a manufactured conspiracy.

So back to that grammar issue. Maybe Wolfs is a way of implying that these two lone wolves are not two of the same wolf, but for the overly grammatically discerning, two different types of wolf. Two wolfs. Yeah, it still doesn’t work. Ah, who cares. Just see it.

Extra points if you get the homage in the final frame to an even more exuberant and unabashed buddy movie.