(courtesy IMP Awards)
Life almost never comes with do-overs.
If you stuff up, and pretty much all us do in ways big and small, you have to live with the mess and the chaos, the consequences of your ill-judged actions hanging around your neck like a medieval seafaring albatross.
But what if there was something you could call, someone who could step in, clean up the shattered pieces and restore life to, if not exactly what it was, a facsimile so real and true that no one would ever guess things had gone to sh*t in the first place.
That kind of help is well beyond the means of most mere mortals but if you’re an up-and-coming Manhattan District Attorney, Margaret (Amy Ryan), then making the consequences of an uncharacterisally ill-thought night is as easy as one simple phone call.
Shaking, in tears and covered in blood, she dials a number which belongs to George Clooney’s unnamed fixer who assures her he can make it all go away if she just sits still, doesn’t do anything untoward and waits for him to come to her very pricey, glass and blood covered hotel room high atop a skyscraper hotel in New York.
Just as Margaret’s man is doing his smooth and practised thing, another fixer all but strong arms his way into the room, taking Margaret and her fixer by surprise; Brad Pitt’s fixer, known as Pam’s Man, is employed by the luxury’s hotel’s extremely image-conscious owner who’s determined that a potentially PR-lethal headline won’t affect her at all.
The only problem here? Both Clooney and Pitt operates as lone wolves, or Wolfs for the titular purpose this film, written and directed by Jon Watts, and working with someone else is not part of their make-up nor the job brief.
But Pam insists they have no choice but to work together since Clooney is already in the picture, and on CCTV, and can’t simply be removed from the situation without some major complications of his own.
The scene is set for a comedy based on not so much opposites attracting because they dress, act and talk almost exactly the same, despite either being unwilling to admit to that – who wants to admit you’re not unique? Not these guys – but on likeminded people who suddenly find themselves working together to get rid of a body, a potential scandal and restore Margaret and Pam’s worlds back to their stable, PR-friendly axes.
Sure, it won’t be straightforward but it can’t be too difficult can it? They’ve all done things like this many times before and this can’t be any different, except for the unwanted colleague factor?
You know, of course, as Clooney and Pitt banter with each other with snark and charm and that winning way that has seen do spectacularly well in similar roles throughout their careers, that things will most assuredly go of kilter and quite impressively and amusingly so, but what marks a reasonably ordinary but entertaining film as something fun to watch, is that Watts doesn’t pull the full buddy-comedy slapstick lever.
In fact, where most films would go pedal to the metal with sight gags and comedically-laced complications to the point where any subtlety of character and plot might be lost, Wolfs does not, and while the story gets ever more complicatedly absurd, and Clooney’s fixer tries his best to work out’s happening behind the scenes (nothing good, of course), there’s an admirable restraint exercised which gives some surprising elements of the film a chance to breathe.
Those surprises do not include the fact that Clooney and Pitt’s fixers will bond, despite their best efforts not to do so; that happens much as you’d expect but what’s fun to watch is how the two veteran actors make it feel reasonably fresh and fun and imbue the prickly coming together of two lone workers feel organic and natural.
It’s not easy in some ways since that bonding takes place with gangsters shooting and bodies not being quite as dead as anyone thought and a conspiracy percolating away, the true nature of which doesn’t really become apparent until the mischievously-realised but well-executed final scene.
Where things do get surprising is how the newfound friendship and working relationship – it’s still tentative by film’s end but getting there – expresses itself and how the two lonely souls begin to realise that nayb e having a buddy isn’t such a bad thing, after all.
Wolfs stops this becoming ridiculously cheesy and overly sentimental, and excels in its depiction of the real need everyone has for belonging and connection in a film that stays low, quiet and very close to the narrative background.
It is a little quiet at times, and takes its time getting places, and oh, to steal from Seuss, the places they do indeed go, but overall Wolfs works in its own quietly absurdist way because it always pulls back when it could go full throttle, its creative eye more on the characters in play and what all of the unusual events of the longest of mights could all mean.
It’s the sort of film that could really bust out loose and furious and be a highly comedic and verbally slapstick Good Fellas, but it stays its calm and nuanced course, and while it’s maybe a little too restrained at times for its own good and may not make any, or many, “Best films of 2024” lists, it’s a lot of fun, buoyed by Clooney and Pitt’s performances and the sweet likability of Austin Abrams as the Kid whose exact role in the film and presence in the narrative must be left to the watching of the film.
Wolfs is overall an entertainingly enjoyable film because while it does have some obviously populist elements to it, it is ultimately a blockbuster tale clothed in the skin of cinematographically well-lit and moody indie with charm and humour, that could go big and wide and slapstick the hell out of everything but which visually restrained and character-centric, yielding in the end a film that entertains in a thoughtfully comedic way and which gives its two leads the chance to do what they do best for the benefit of the film overall.