Movie Review: Wolfs

There’s something magical about watching bona fide movie stars playing the sort of roles that ask them to do little more than ooze charisma for a few hours, and that is exactly what Wolfs tasks George Clooney and Brad Pitt with doing. If you’ve ever seen any of the modern Ocean’s movies, it will come as no surprise that they excel in the roles, even if writer / director Jon Watts’ (Spider-Man: No Way Home) latest isn’t as smart as those movies.

Margaret (Amy Ryan), a Manhattan D.A., finds herself in a tough spot. The young man (Austin Abrams) that she met at a hotel bar and took up to her room fell off the bed, hit his head, and now appears to be dead. She remembers that she had been given a number to call in the event of this sort of thing and gets connected with a fixer (Clooney). He arrives and gets started with his process, when another fixer (Pitt) arrives on the scene at the request of the hotel, who had apparently seen everything via a hidden camera. Their line of work generally requires that they work alone, and so neither man wants to work with the other, but Margaret and the hotel insist that they do, and so they reluctantly assent.

After sending Margaret home, the duo discover that the dead guy had a large quantity of narcotics in his backpack, complicating the matter. The situation becomes even messier when they learn that their corpse is actually alive. Though that quickly looks like a possible blessing, as they can presumably find out who the drugs belong to from him. Of course, nothing about what ensues can be simple, or this would be a very dull movie, and they wind up traipsing around the city to try and return the drugs without getting killed and decide what to do about their new young “problem”.

If you’ve ever seen an action comedy before you won’t be very surprised by the film’s plot, which is fairly thin even for this kind of movie. The action itself is staged competently and clearly, with occasional flashes of style, while the comedy is more of the “constant grin” than “laugh-out-loud” variety. Abrams does a good job as the naive young man who has found himself in way over his head, and holds his own against the two leads, but this is Clooney and Pitt’s movie and through their sheer magnetism they make the fairly rote material feel special. There are a few touching nods to male loneliness, but this isn’t the sort of movie one comes to for a message, this is the sort of movie one comes to for fun, and Wolfs delivers plenty of that. ★★★★