Wolfs – A Comedy Caper Too Slick For Its Own Good

For a film that so clearly coasts off the longstanding star power of George Clooney and Brad Pitt, the trailer for Apple’s latest grasp at a film hit, Wolfs, places just as much emphasis on their names as it does on the words “Written and Directed By Jon Watts.” This is funny for several reasons, chief among them being the fact that, in spite of coming off one of the most financially successful films ever made, the average person is likely to respond to the name “Jon Watts” with about as much enthusiasm as they would the name of their local plumber. Suffice it to say, even after becoming the first (and so far, only) director to see an entire MCU trilogy through from beginning to end (or perhaps as a direct result of the directorial anonymity required for such an achievement), Watts’s name plastered all over the trailer and poster isn’t likely to drum up the kind of fervour one would get from a Quentin Tarantino or a Paul Thomas Anderson.

The Tarantino name-drop is apt, for Wolfs answers the question everybody (… or, maybe somebody?) has been asking since the landmark release of Pulp Fiction 30 years ago: What if Harvey Keitel’s scene-stealing Winston Wolf were the focus of his own story… and there were two of him? To answer this burning question, Watts calls upon the seasoned charisma of his two leads to play nameless fixers forced to work together when a simple cover-up job for a desperate politician (Ryan), whose impromptu night of fun has gone wrong, unfurls into the most pointlessly convoluted conspiracy plot this side of Dan Brown. Each of these men is a lone wolf with no desire to collaborate, but now they must do exactly that (hence, the awkward—but not technically incorrect—pluralization of the film’s title that even the YouTube search bar still refuses to comprehend outright).

So needlessly complicated is the plot of Wolfs, in fact, that Watts opts to acknowledge that fact in the smarmiest manner possible, having his two leads (on more than one occasion) talk over one another with competing, incomprehensible explanations, capped off with a simple shrug before moving along. Though this technique enables for some quick demonstration of the existing chemistry being dusted off the pair who made magic in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trilogy and the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading (speaking of which, look out for a cute, if very obvious, Coen-adjacent voice cameo early on), it also demonstrates a clear disinterest from the filmmaker in expanding upon his story’s promise beyond that basic reluctant camaraderie.

Wolfs very quickly establishes that Pitt and Clooney (these “characters” apparently have names, but they remain unsaid across the entire film) are essentially playing the same person, which makes the brief moments of cutesy cleverness, mostly derived from the joke of these two smooth operators getting up there in age, fizzle beneath a larger project that provides virtually no opportunity for either of them to stand out. For a film that so desperately wants to be a Tarantino riff—as if we’ve found a wormhole into the late ’90s—Watts, like all of the auteur’s blandest imitators, has none of the biting wit or flair for world-building, framing every revelation and piece of plot development as a casual disclosure made on a “need-to-know” basis; this also, by proxy, kills any tension in the plot because Watts doesn’t even try to keep us in the loop in any significant ways on where the dangers are and who’s on whose backs in the first place.

As with most comedies, though, most of the frustration (or, more accurately, numbing indifference) of this mad libs-style plotting could easily be brushed to the side if Wolfs were actually, you know… funny. Alas, buried in Watts’s workmanlike approach to both film style and characterization, the film comes across as yet another focus-grouped caper whose testing and efforts never went past who was going to carry the film in front of the camera. (Disgruntled line delivery can only go so far before we start to wonder whether the actors are just as bored as we are.) Unfortunately for Wolfs, the person carrying the weight behind the camera is just as, if not far more important, and Watts is about as capable of recalling Soderbergh’s smugness as he is incapable of recalling his formal precision. If this is the guy whose number one is told to call to fix their problem, they might want to think about erasing the contact altogether.

still courtesy of Apple TV+

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Julian Malandruccolo

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