Wolfs

Margaret didn’t do anything. She swears she didn’t.

Oh, admittedly, she was in a high-priced penthouse suite with a much younger guy whom she’d just met, like, minutes before. And no, that wouldn’t look great on the prospective District Attorney’s election flyer.

But is it her fault that the guy started jumping on the bed in his underwear? Or that he fell off the bed and smashed his head through a glass table? Or that he’s now lying, in his underwear, in a pool of blood and is absolutely, positively, no-doubt-about-it dead?

No. No it is not.

So the law-and-order politician dials a number she never thought she’d need: the number to a fixer, a guy who can make the whole sordid scene disappear with nary a blip.

The man (played by George Clooney) arrives a few minutes later and looks at the scene with professional tact. He reassures her that everything will be fine. Juuuust fine.

“I didn’t know people like you existed,” Margaret admits.

“They don’t,” the man tells her. “There’s nobody who can do what I do.”

Still, he can’t do it instantly.

So when he and Margaret hear someone else at the door, both of them freeze. And when that “someone else” opens the door with his own magical key card, can you blame them for being nervous?

Not to worry, the new man (played by Brad Pitt) says. He’s a fixer, too, in the employ of the hotel’s owner. And that owner will do anything to protect her property from scandal. The hotel owner says that this new fixer is awesome at making problems—even when they include dead bodies—just go away.

“There is, quite simply, no one else out there who can do what he does,” the owner says.

But Margaret doesn’t trust this new guy. The hotel owner doesn’t trust Margaret’s guy. The solution?

These two fixers will have to fix this problem together.

That’s bad enough for the two professionals: Fixers don’t have partners. They work alone; it’s part of the gig. Their employers want to be sure that they have no loyalties outside the job, because those jobs can get plenty dirty. So working with someone else? Anathema.

But the news gets worse. The new guy finds a backpack. And in that backpack, he finds four bricks of pure heroin. The hotel owner tells the two fixers that once they dispose of the kid, they’ll need to find the heroin’s “rightful” owner—because the hotel doesn’t need that kind of trouble, either.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, they have a new problem to contend with. When the fixers dump the kid’s remains in the back of a car trunk, the absolutely, positively, no-doubt-about-it dead man … opens his eyes.

The two fixers don’t like each other. Not one bit. But they agree on one thing: It’s going to be a long night.

Characters of virtue do not populate the cinematic landscape of Wolfs. But in the midst of all the movie’s dirty dealings, we do see a sliver of … decency?

We’ll start with the character known only as the Kid—who, as you might’ve guessed, is absolutely, positively alive. Yes, that drug-filled backpack is his. But the drugs? Not so much. He was only dropping the drugs off to help out a friend whose mother just died. Man, if you can’t help out a grieving buddy when he needs it, what’s the world coming to?

Well, the two fixers figure that “dead mom” story is about as real as a living unicorn made out of gumdrops, but no matter. They tell him that he needs to finish the drop. “You took the job, you gave your word,” one tells him.

Keeping your word is extraordinarily important to both Margaret’s fixer and the hotel’s fixer. “You give your word, and that’s the measure of a man,” one says, and both embrace that ethos. Yes, they often give their word to do heinous and illegal things. But the idea that they both would hate to go back on a promise? That’s good for something.

[Spoiler Warning] But both find there are limits to that understood promise, too. Both know that the Kid is a very troublesome loose end. Both know that when the drugs are returned, they’re kinda-sorta obligated to make sure that the Kid won’t—and will never—talk. Neither wants to kill the Kid, but they know they should. Thing is, they don’t. They even give him a ride home.

When the drugs are discovered, the hotel’s fixer says that he doesn’t want to search for the drugs’ owner by knocking on doors like a “Jehovah’s Witness.” He also describes the need for fixers to be loners as akin to monasticism. We see, very briefly, a neon cross in the background of one scene.

Margaret and the Kid were not going up to Margaret’s hotel room to simply watch television. No sir. They both had hanky-panky in mind: The Kid had stripped down to his socks and brief-style underwear, and Margaret says they were “fooling around” in bed when the accident happened. (Their “fooling around” had not yet progressed too far; voyeuristic security footage shows the Kid, in his skivvies, jumping on the bed while Margaret laughs.)

When the Kid wakes up, he starts sprinting through the city—again, only wearing his socks and undies. The extended scene is meant to be comical rather than titillating, but yeah, viewers will see a lot of skin and some uncomfortable close-ups of certain areas of the Kid’s body.

When the fixers catch the Kid, they hand him women’s clothing to wear (parts of outfits that they had originally bought for Margaret to replace her blood-stained clothes). Then they check into a very seedy hotel that includes at least one room that can be rented by the hour. (They must explain, once again, that the Kid is not a prostitute; the hotel manager clearly doubts that, and she’s accepting of the same-sex, three-way tryst that she imagines they’ll have.) The hotel fixer complains, “I feel like I’m getting syphilis just standing here.”

The three of them also visit June, a doctor and apparently the girlfriend for one of the fixers. The other fixer makes several remarks designed to make the first think that he also has been sleeping with June, though that later proves to be untrue.

The Kid mentions that some women his own age hit on him when he first entered the hotel, “throwing themselves at me.”

Wolfs opens with the Kid’s apparent accidental death. We see his “corpse”  from several angles, and the disposal of the body becomes a lowkey, running gag. When the Kid wakes up in the trunk of the car, both fixers punch him in the face to knock him out again.

When the Kid takes off running through the city’s streets—as a reminder, practically naked—he causes several accidents (though most appear to be relatively minor). He’s almost run over by a car, but he balletically escapes injury.

Loads of people die in gunfights. Three are shot in rapid succession (including one in the head), and we see several more bodies scattered around a huge garage. (The cars parked there are pocked with bullet holes and spattered with blood.) Two people stagger out of the garage and fall, their blood staining the white snow.

The two fixers discuss how difficult and painful it can be to kill another person. A couple of people get into a fistfight during a wedding party; two men whale on each other with their fists outside. One fixer talks about how a doctor saved his life from a shrapnel wound. We hear how another doctor removed his patients’ kidneys without permission. Fixers swap veiled stories about their previous jobs. Blood splatters on clothes and a cell phone.

The fixers are worried—and not without justification—about being murdered both by a vicious Albanian gang and a former employer.

Nearly 70 f-words and about two-dozen s-words. We also hear “a–,” “b–ch,” “h—,” “d–k” and “pr–k.” God’s name is misused about 10 times, twice with “d–n,” and Jesus’ name is abused about a half-dozen times. An obscene gesture is made.

The four bricks of heroin are said to be worth about $250,000. The Kid admits to using a bit of it, much to his regret. He says that delivering the drugs made him feel cool for the first time in his life. He wanted to amp up that feeling, but says, “It didn’t make me feel cool. I just … I just—” And then he pantomimes his head exploding with his hands.

The Kid’s use of the heroin likely led to his accident and nearly untimely death—but it’s suggested that he might’ve been using something else beforehand.

Someone gives the Kid a drink, which he doesn’t take. When Margaret first talks with her fixer, he tells her to not do anything until he gets there, including pouring herself a drink “to steady your nerves.” Once he arrives, though, he encourages Margaret to take that drink. “Strong is probably best.”

People talk about liking particular bars and ordering drinks there. People smoke cigarettes. There’s talk of a scheme to have someone purposely overdose. We hear reference to a “magic drug.” The Kid mentions being a bit hung over the morning of the drug delivery.

Cockroaches crawl around the slimy hotel the fixers and the Kid are in. Before they leave, they discover a rather adorable rat staring at them.

An act of betrayal takes place. A hotel surveils its guests without their knowledge.

George Clooney and Brad Pitt have been A-list movie stars for decades now. And while they may be getting older, they’re still just as suave and charismatic as ever. My guess is that, generally, fixers don’t look as if they’ve stepped out of GQ magazine.

Apple TV+ is banking on that Pitt/Clooney charisma machine to power Wolfs. And yeah, it almost works. A story that feels both unnecessarily convoluted and rather predictable takes on the sheen of its stars, and as a result it’s almost watchable.

Almost watchable, that is, if it wasn’t for all those pesky content concerns.

Granted, Wolfs doesn’t spatter the screen with gore or assault viewers with nudity. For an R-rated crime caper, this one feels more restrained than most. Still, the body count is deceptively high, and you do see one particular body in his skivvies far more than is warranted.

And then, of course, you’ve got the language to navigate. The first three words of dialogue are each f-words, and it goes downhill from there.

The draw of Wolfs will be, of course, its two headliners. Pitt and Clooney haven’t shared the screen since 2011’s Touch of Evil, if my math is right. And rumor has it that a sequel may already be in the works. But Wolfs is not built for family viewing. And even for other would-be viewers, this film can bite.

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