R | 1h 48m | Comedy, Action, Thriller | Sept. 27, 2024 (Apple TV+)
One Snowy New York Night
There’s crash and a scream in a luxury hotel room. Margaret (Amy Ryan), a DA up for reelection, had been, er, “entertaining” a young fellow (Austin Abrams, who looks like Nat and Alex Wolff had a third sibling) who, in an advanced state of inebriation, was jumping up and down on the bed in his skivvies, took a bad bounce, landed face-first on the drink cart, and would now appear to be dead. As Margaret later insists, repeatedly, the kid was “not a prostitute.” Sure, Margaret.She dials a phone number bequeathed to her in case of emergencies. The voice of George Clooney, the last-of-the-old-school-movie-stars, answers. Clooney in fixer character soon shows up at her hotel room.
He says she’s not to worry, because he’s a master magician, able to make such scenes disappear without a trace. She should be thankful, because there is no one else with his particular skill set. Or at least not of his caliber. Clooney’s character, similarly to the dead kid being only referred to as “The Kid,” is known only as “Margaret’s Man.”
Two Better Than One?
When Pam lays down the ultimatum that both fixers will team up and work together, a barrage of snide, sarcastic, and competitive remarks starts up. Alphas are territorial. They bicker over who’s got the better way to do this or that bit of fixer protocol. Sometimes they’re reluctant to perform their particular technique in front of the other guy, because neither wants the other guy stealing his trade tricks.
After Margaret leaves, and nonstop mutual derision of each other, they manage to cooperate with the body-bagging and cleanup. At least, they do until Pam’s Man catches sight of a monkey-wrench, er, backpack, behind the couch that’s got four bricks of white powder in it. In addition to disposing of the body, Pam and Margaret’s men have to figure out where the drugs came from.
Right about now the dead kid wakes up, and Abrams nearly steals the movie out from under Clooney and Pitt’s noses with a motor-mouthed monologue about how it came to be that he was in possession of a bag of drugs.
Turns out The Kid’s a hapless, uncool college kid who was goaded into transporting the backpack for a friend. He tried a bit of the product, which was a bad idea because he suddenly felt super-cool, like he was in a movie or something, and girls were hitting on him in bars, and so was this older (but still sexy) lady in the hotel lobby, and he was feeling so happy he had to jump up and down on the bed in his tighty-whities and that’s all he remembers.
Pam and Margaret’s Men don’t believe a word of it because they don’t trust anybody. Not him, and especially not each other. But they still need to find the original owner of the drugs, or they could all end up being disposed of by a different sort of fixer.
There’s an interminable car chase of the kid, in his underwear, in the snow, in and around New York’s Chinatown and the Lower East Side, and down into the subway, and up some scaffolding. The Kid’s got quite a bit of energy. The two older men, not so much.
But there’s also eventual fixer-bonding. Of course there is. That’s the whole point. There’s a familiar feeling to it, that, when a scene, lifted straight out of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” shows up, you go, “Ah yes. Butch and Sundance.”
George Clooney and Brad Pitt aren’t quite as big as Paul Newman and Robert Redford were, but they’re very close. “Butch Cassidy” was a game-changer, though, and this little funny-ish comedy-thriller “Wolfs” is a far cry from that hysterical, historical comedy.
The bickering is sometimes fun, mostly predictable, and Pitt hams it up to the point that I blame the director. One thing’s for sure—if it was anybody else but these two working this dud script, there wouldn’t be nearly enough charisma to jump-start it. For the same reason, it gets 3 instead of 2 1/2 stars.
