Two competing cleaners reluctantly have to partner up for a job in Wolfs. District attorney Margaret (Amy Ryan) panics when the Kid (Austin Abrams) she brought up to her hotel room seemingly drops dead. In desperation, Margaret calls a cleaner (George Clooney) to help resolve this problem. However, Margaret’s Man is shocked by the arrival of a second cleaner (Brad Pitt) hired by the hotel’s manager Pam (voiced by an uncredited Frances McDormand), who has been watching the whole scenario on surveillance and wants both cleaners to team up for the job. However, Margaret’s Man and Pam’s Man find that they are in for a long night when they not only find a stash of drugs in the hotel room but that the Kid isn’t as dead as they initially believed.
Wolfs Synopsis
Wolfs is a single-night crime thriller written and directed by Jon Watts (Cop Car) and reunites George Clooney and Brad Pitt, who previously worked together in the Ocean’s Eleven trilogy and the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading. Clooney and Pitt play two anonymous cleaners, credited as “Margaret’s Man” and “Pam’s Man” respectively, who are both called to dispose of a body in the hotel room of respected District Attorney Margaret, played by Amy Ryan (The Office, Only Murders in the Building). Despite the reputation of both as Lone Wolves, these two cleaners are told to join forces on this job.
What starts as a simple clean-up job becomes a lot more complicated when Pam’s Man finds a backpack full of drugs in the hotel room. It also turns out that the seemingly dead Kid, played by Austin Abrams (Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark), was merely passed out from a drug overdose and soon recovers with the help of the men’s mutual contact June (Poorna Jagannathan). The Kid wants assistance to complete a drug dropoff, which requires a stopover at a nightclub owned by Dimitri (Zlatko Buric), a previous employer of both cleaners.
My Thoughts on Wolfs
After spending much of the last decade helming the trilogy of Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far from Home, and Spider-Man: No Way Home, writer and director Jon Watts returns with a crime thriller closer in tone to his 2015 breakthrough film Cop Car. While the narrative of Wolfs is played relatively straight, the film features much dark humour, thanks to the banter between stars George Clooney and Brad Pitt. The chemistry between Clooney and Pitt elevates Wolfs from being a relatively average crime-thriller.
Wolfs follows the After Hours template of taking place throughout a single night, with George Clooney and Brad Pitt being joined by a rotating cast of supporting characters. The longest, and arguably best, sequence of Wolfs is the hotel-set first act, where the two cleaners compete for the services of panicking District Attorney Margaret. It’s a shame that, apart from Margaret appearing on several billboards throughout the film, Amy Ryan doesn’t have a larger role in Wolfs, since she is arguably the female lead in a cast dominated by men, with the only other female character being the doctor June, played by Poorna Jagannathan. Some of the other familiar faces in the one-night odyssey of Wolfs are Zlatko Buric (Triangle of Sadness) as crime boss Dimitri and Richard Kind (Beau is Afraid) as Kid’s Father.
The biggest reason to see Wolfs is the reunion between George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Both stars are now much older than they last collaborated, sporting greying beards and at one point requiring reading glasses. However, Clooney and Pitt have such immense chemistry with each other and, even though the rest of the narrative is relatively average, it is fun to just hang out with these characters.
