Illustration by Michael DiMilo
Bad Buddies: Review of Wolfs
★★★☆☆
There is a lot to like in Jon Watts’ new film Wolfs. In many ways, it’s like curling up in the family room recliner. It’s familiar, comfortable, and reassuring. It features well-known actors in roles we’ve seen them in before; it is a genre we’re familiar with, and—since it is a Hollywood movie, after all—it has an abundance of gunplay, car chases, and well-worn jokes. And it’s a rather unusual riff on the all-too-familiar “buddy film” genre.
George Clooney and Brad Pitts play unnamed “fixers” (experts at discreetly eliminating evidence and covering up crimes) who are called to the scene of an incident at a swanky New York hotel. It seems that Margaret (Amy Ryan) a Manhattan DA, had invited a young man (The Kid, played by Austin Abrams) to her room for fun and games. After he apparently dies during some wild antics, she panics and calls Clooney who arrives and begins his cleaning process.
He begins to efficiently clean the scene and dispose of the body, all the while instructing Margaret how to construct an alibi. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Pitt, the other fixer, appears in the room. He refuses to say who called for him. The two men, self-professed lone wolves, are vehemently distrustful of the other. When Pitt’s client (the owner of the hotel who has witnessed the incident on closed-circuit TV) calls and tells him to keep an eye on Clooney (who has to stay because he was caught on camera), the two are forced to, if not cooperate, then to at least coexist.
Margaret, caught in the middle, dresses in the clothes brought by Pitt and Clooney (Pitt’s blouse and Clooney’s skirt) and leaves. When Pitt suddenly discovers a backpack full of drugs, things get complicated. The fixers know that once the owners start sniffing around for their stash, the entire project will blow up and realize they now must return the drugs.
Clooney packs up the body and the two, all the while trading barbs, make their way down to the parking garage. Each compares and criticizes the other’s technique. Pitt shows a grudging admiration for Clooney’s method of loading the body onto a luggage cart while Clooney seems impressed by Pitt’s method of disabling the garage security.
Things take an interesting twist when the body (The Kid) suddenly awakens. Although conscious, he is incoherent, so the fixers decide to take him to their doctor. Clooney tries his, who will not pick up, and so they go to Pitt’s connection—and ex-girlfriend—June (Poona Jagannathan) in Chinatown. They argue and June finally agrees to treat the kid. In yet another twist, it turns out Clooney knows June, too, and that they have been romantically involved. At any rate, June agrees to help. After reviving The Kid, who takes off in a drug-induced panic through the streets of Chinatown in his tidy whities, the two have to cooperate in order to apprehend him and get to the bottom of how the drugs got into the room.
Things get complicated and weird as the two fixers realize they are closer than they realize. Besides both being friends with June, they have Albanian mobster/client friends and a favorite breakfast joint in common. Of course, the actors (not the fixers) Clooney and Pitt have worked together before.
As Danny Ocean and Rusty Ryan in Steven Soderbergh’s Oceans 11 heist film (and sequels), they provided a profound element of coolness punctuated with shrewd intelligence, street savvy and suave style. They aspired to be—and mostly succeeded as—the new rat pack.
And George Clooney previously played the titular role of fixer Michael Clayton in that extraordinarily intelligent and gripping thriller. So, we have seen both these actors as friends, as fixers, and as criminals. And, of course, gunfights with automatic weapons and car chases across the streets of New York are the bread and butter of Hollywood action films.
What makes Wolfs different is the fact that the two protagonists become friends despite themselves. In a profession that demands one works in solitude, the two discover that they have more in common than one could imagine, and that—in the end—they are more similar than different. The tension (or chemistry) between them is palpable. In an unusual situation that neither expects, things get competitive—and funny. Clooney’s deadpan reactions to Pitt’s taunts and one-upmanship is priceless, as are Pitt’s amused smirks.
Wolfs is a well-written and well-directed feature film. It delivers on audience expectations and, with a sly sense of humor, sometimes exceeds them. It is not a particularly profound or insightful film; in fact, it is eminently predictable and formulaic.
Yet there are subtleties and surprises that keep things interesting. As The Kid, Austin Abrams provides a hilarious naïve goofiness lying just under the surface of his self-absorbed pretentious college kid persona. He is a born scene stealer. As Margaret, Amy Ryan provides a beautiful balance between hysteria, bewilderment, and—finally—disbelief. Even the title Wolfs (instead of the grammatically correct wolves) emphasizes the point that the two lone wolfs will never hunt together in a pack—they will never be a team.
Wolfs is fun and it is exactly (with a few twists) what the viewer expects. Jon Watts’ screenplay and direction are clever and absorbing, but the film is only what it seems. A buddy film about guys who don’t want to be buddies. With guns.