In Wolfs, George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s new Apple TV+ buddy action-comedy about a rivalry between two lone-wolf fixers cleaning up a crime scene, you’ll find exactly what you’re looking for: lax, unambitious entertainment for dark times.
Brad Pitt and George Clooney in Wolfs. (Apple TV+)
You know what you’re going to get as soon as you hear about Wolfs, an Apple TV+ movie written and directed by Jon Watts (Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far From Home, and Spider-Man: No Way Home) and featuring unusual star power in the form of George Clooney and Brad Pitt. It’s going to be a mildly entertaining buddy movie tailored to them, a low-stakes action-comedy to watch when nothing better is on and you want something vaguely affable playing on-screen.
It’s about two unnamed fixers, each one a lone wolf who believes himself to be the only one who can handle the cleanup and cover-up of murder scenes with maximum professionalism. For complicated reasons, they get sent to the same crime scene and are arm-twisted into handling it together. Both are spiky and resentful, insulting each other nonstop, until certain developments begin to make it clear that this is no ordinary unlawful mess they’ve fallen into. You guessed it: they’re going to need to work together to figure out what’s really going on and why they actually got called in.
There, now you know the whole thing. You can just imagine all the byplay — Clooney doing that sharp head-twist thing with his eyes popping and his jaw jutting out that he does to express maximum impatience in an argument, Pitt staring scornfully while he drawls out a laconic burn, and so on. The convoluted crimes, the weird developments, the way the lone wolves gradually open up about their strange life paths and start becoming friends, et cetera.
The only surprise about their casting and performances is that Clooney is playing the fixer who’s supposed to be the significantly older man, while Pitt is the younger-generation fixer, which makes their rivalry even more charged. Since in reality, Clooney is sixty-three years old and Pitt is sixty, a few visual signifiers are necessary to make them look a little less like absolute peers. Clooney is given a gray beard, while Pitt’s graying hair is dyed a more youthful blondish-brown, and the rest is left to the viewer to imagine.
The critical reaction to Wolfs is pretty lukewarm, but I confess I enjoyed it for a very particular reason. I’d just watched Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s late-career go-for-broke art film spectacular that’s such a sad, demoralizing failure, it was heart-lightening to watch an amiable low-stakes genre film that more or less hits its easy action-comedy targets. Wolfs is too slow, and it never generates the out-of-control momentum of dark hilarity it seems to be going for, but otherwise it ambles along doing its thing fairly pleasantly, and that seemed like an entertainment gift to me.
George Clooney in Wolfs. (Apple TV+)
It helps a lot that the movie is packed with great talent. I assume that’s because Clooney and Pitt also produced it, via their production companies, Smokehouse Pictures and Plan B Entertainment. You know it’s got to be something like that when top actors are showing up to do very small roles. Amy Ryan owns the opening sequence as Margaret, the Manhattan district attorney who picks up a much younger man at a hotel party, a never-named twentyish naif referred to as the Kid (Austin Abrams). She soon regrets it. As she relates it to the Clooney Fixer, the Kid was jumping on the bed in an excess of joy when he fell backward onto the bar cart, hit his head, and died amid the smashed glassware.
Now she needs to make this whole lurid scenario disappear, and she’s very anxious to convince the dubious Clooney Fixer that the Kid “was NOT a prostitute!”
However, in the meantime, the posh hotel owner Pam, who’s got surveillance cameras everywhere, has noted the unsavory developments in Margaret’s room and sent her own on-call guy, the Pitt Fixer, to handle things. Pam is only an authoritative voice on the phone, but that voice happens to be Frances McDormand’s.
Later on, terrific character actor Richard Kind shows up in a role so small you’ll miss it if you go into the kitchen to get another beer. But he nails his minor character as memorably as he always does.
Given all this top talent, it’s striking to note that the most arresting performance in the film is given by the least well-known actor, Austin Abrams (Euphoria, The Walking Dead) as the Kid. Which I guess constitutes a spoiler, since in order to give that performance, it means the Kid can’t really be dead before the main plot even gets underway.
Abrams is great as the nerdy boy so far out of his depth in a world of murder cleanups, major drug deliveries, and organized crime, he’s like a baby duck in a shooting gallery. “Adorkable” is, I believe, the word, and the Kid is nervously garrulous as he delivers several long jittery monologues that Abrams handles wonderfully as he’s menaced on both sides by the angsty Fixers who have no time to waste, usually because the Albanian mafia is about to show up.
Anyway, it’s there on Apple TV+ if you need it. Lax, unambitious entertainment that you hardly have to pay attention to has its uses in these dark times.
