The storyline of two people who don’t like each other at first but must stay together or work together for a while has been used several times over the years. I think it may have originated with movies like “The Odd Couple” and “It Happened One Night”. More recently it’s often been a storyline where a police officer or detective needs to work with someone else in movies like “Rush Hour”, “48 Hours”, and “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”. One of the keys to the movie working or not working is the dynamic between the two people. In the new movie “Wolfs”, the dynamic works really well, which is good because the rest of the movie isn’t strong.
The movie starts with a female D.A. (Amy Ryan) in a penthouse of a hotel with a body of a young man (Austin Abrams) “who is not a prostitute” (as a few people say a few times). Out of desperation she calls a special number. Soon after, a “fixer” (George Clooney) shows up to clean up the problem. As he’s working on cleaning everything up, a 2nd “fixer” (Brad Pitt) enters the room. The owner of the hotel (voice of Frances McDormand) observed what happened via cameras that are in the penthouse living room and bedroom. The D.A. wants to make sure that the incident doesn’t affect her so she called the first fixer, the owner of the hotel wants to make sure that the incident doesn’t affect the hotel so she called her own fixer.
As the 2nd fixer is “supervising” the first one cleaning up, he notices a backpack sitting in the corner of the living room. The backpack contains several large packets of cocaine. Suddenly, the fixing has become more difficult. Both fixers want out but they both get talked into staying and somehow talked into working together to make sure that everything is properly cleaned up. Not long after they clean up the penthouse and remove the body, everything gets even more difficult when they discover the young man isn’t dead (“did you forget to check if the body was dead. I always check that first”)
George Clooney and Brad Pitt have been friends for years and have acted together in the “Oceans 11” trilogy, the Coen brother’s movie “Burn After Reading”, and the first movie Clooney directed “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” (Brad Pitt has a brief cameo). They have a funny rapport in this movie. Some scenes are even reminiscent of a Steven Soderbergh or Coen brothers movie. This is important because the two of them and the young man are the main characters in this movie. There are other costars including the DA in the opening scene, a doctor (Poorna Jagannathan), and a drug kingpin (Zlatko Buric), but the costars are only in the movie a short time.
Instead of having more time showing the other people in the movie, the movie has some scenes that I think could have been shortened or cut. There’s a scene where they chase the young boy through the city that goes on way too long, a scene where the young man explains where and why he has the cocaine also goes too long, and I’m not quite sure why there’s a scene where they talk to a man who is a Frank Sinatra fanatic. Maybe it’s because the man is played Richard Kind who is one of George Clooney’s close friends. In interviews, George sometimes says “I have to put him in movies because he has pictures of me in compromising positions.”
Overall, I somewhat recommend this movie because of the funny banter between the two stars, which makes up for the scenes that are too long or not needed and the holes in the storyline. One of the plot holes is that the movie never fully explains why the two fixers agree to work together, but I’m glad that they did. If the movie would have been just one of the guys with the young man – who gets increasingly annoying as the movie goes on – I would have hated it. Instead, I plan to watch it again on a streaming channel with captions on so I can figure out what each person is saying when they’re occasionally speaking at the same time.
One note about the streaming channel. For some reason Apple changed the theatrical release of this movie. It was going to have a wide release, but they decided to change it to a 1-week limited release before it premieres on Apple TV on Sept 27. Although the movie got a good reception at a recent film festival and got some good reviews – plus there is already a sequel movie in the works – most people will unfortunately end up seeing it on Apple TV. Even if they did get to see it in a movie theater, it wasn’t playing on any large screens because of the limited release and the 1-week window before it premieres on a streaming channel. The only large screen the movie was playing on in L.A. was an IMAX screen in Hollywood that only showed it once a day – at 9:30pm. I couldn’t make it to that showing so I saw it on a medium sized screen which wasn’t as good. I hope they have a bigger theatrical release if a sequel is ever made.
LOS ANGELES FILM REVIEW 