Wolfs (2024)

Written & Directed by Jon Watts

With: George Clooney as Margaret’s Man, Brad Pitt as Pam’s Man, Amy Ryan as Margaret, Austin Abrams as Kid, Poorna Jagannathan as June, Zlatko Burić as Dimitri, Richard Kind as Kid’s dad, & Frances McDormand as the voice of Pamela Dowd-Henry

Here’s the deal:  if there is a god, or supreme being or higher power as our friends in AA say, he enjoys a personal hatred for me. Why? I do not know, nor can I imagine. I am a nice guy. I give an honest opinion when reviewing a movie, based on my background, clarity of vision, and superior critical skills based on years of serious study.  However; I’m humble about it.  I believe cinema is an art-form, but I don’t expect every movie to be a work of art! No, I expect at the very least some entertainment that makes some little story sense.

Which is how we arrive at the new Apple TV + offering titled Wolfs. No, not producers or agents or even our hairy four legged friends who keep sheep ranchers in Montana ever vigilant.  No one named Lupien as far as we the viewers know. 

Yeah, knowing my time in this veil of tears is finite, I’d expect the Great Magnet to shout a warning, a base-baritone voice bellowing from the clouds,” John, I am the Lord your god of Cinema!  Be warned, do you sully your thoughts with movies like, ah like, Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1, and Wolfs. Some things you just cannot afford, even those included in the subscription price”.

Like in a Bergman film, I get god’s silence (at least Bergman can direct, something I can’t say for Jon Watts.  Well, he can be said to direct if you have never seen anything other than Eastman Kodak commercials).  The pacing of his scenes almost approached the tedium of a movie like Barry Lyndon.  Snap it up, Howard Hawks, not Stanley Kubrick without the talent, art and craftsmanship.

Writer Jon Watts seems to have studied Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the way Brian De Palma studied Hitchcock. Trouble is, Watts is not William Goldman.  He is not even Pat Hobby.  He “snappy” dialogue relies on the personalities of his actors, Brad Pitt and George Clooney to provide the wit. Actors can only do so much. (even at a reported $35,000,000 each. Sputter, gag. Puke).

The story, such as it is, starts out implausible and slides down hill from  there.  A very slippery slope.

“No place for beginners or sensitive hearts

“When sentiment is left to chance

“No place to be ending, but somewhere to start.”

(Sade singing Smooth Operator on the sound tract is the best thing about this movie.)

Clooney and Pitt are clean-up men of a kind you saw in Three Days of the Condor and John Wick. In and out, the job done quickly. These two are nothing like those guys, fixers more likely to be found in a Jerry Lewis movie than a Elmore Leonard type crime drama. They simply do not come across as tough underworld figures.  They are Smug and Smugger.  Pitt’s smugger is OK, at least he doesn’t do it with his southern accent. Clooney can’t help but radiate that Cary Grant charm.  

Amy Ryan as the Manhattan DA, not an ADA, the DA checks into a $10,000 a night hotel suit with a cute boy-toy who looks like a high school kid, who drops dead before the DA can even get undressed. Damn all the luck.  Amy calls her fixer, and the hotel’s owner calls her fixer, and they both arrive to help her out of a jam.  It seems the hospitality business at the upper end ensures the privacy of guests with surveillance cameras in the rooms, just in case something like this happens.  Or, blackmail is called for.

Pitt and Clooney fall to argue like Don Ameche and Frances Langford on an Old-Time radio rebroadcast of The Bickersons.

Guess what?  No? OK, I’ll tell you.  The dead kid has four bricks of MacGuffin drugs in his backpack.  Another complication?

They finally exit the hotel, only to discover the dead boy-toy is alive!  Another fine mess you have gotten me into, Stanley. Everyone wants to get into the act!  The seemingly dead guy is transformed into an Olympic track star and our heroes must chase him all over the city.  You can run punk, but you can’t hide.

What followed is an mindless odyssey over the city in an effort to return the dope to its rightful owner without getting killed. Plot holes abound. An Ellery Queen or a  quantum computer could not sort it out because it makes no sense. Oh, and some afterthought gun play.

The end offers a Pitt/Clooney high speed denouement, hoping to explain the now convoluted story to the confused viewer. Watts plays out his incompetence straight out to the end, giving the suffering viewer a Butch/Sundance ending.  But wait!  Brad and George have signed for a sequel, so the boys survive to return for another version of the same story.

If this is the best a reportedly $15,000,000 writer/director can do, I say give AI a chance. At least AI comes from a background of artificial experience, honestly.