By nature, Wolfs should be considered a film of much smaller scale. The story of two aging NYC fixers getting booked for the same job is tailor-made for an indie action comedy. But the big catch here is that these two guys are played by names as big as George Clooney and Brad Pitt. And the film is being helmed by someone like Jon Watts, who just happens to be the man who has yielded gold for the MCU with Tom Holland’s Spiderman trilogy. Not to mention, the backing of Apple TV has only taken the stakes higher. All that said, most of Wolfs plays out like an episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and that’s a good thing. The spidey humor of Watts’ films is there as well. Add Pitt’s swagger and Clooney’s coolness into the blender, and you’ve got a clear winner.
But Wolfs aspires to be more than that. It has an incredibly convoluted plot that’s way too smart for its own good. Wolfs’ ending leaves you scratching your head. It’s very hard to see through, and there’s every chance of you coming to the conclusion that things just don’t make sense here. The initial set-up is genuinely intriguing and pretty straightforward, but then it goes to the kind of places where you wouldn’t imagine it going. Pitt and Clooney’s charm is good enough reason for you to stick to Wolfs, and honestly, they make it work very well. In this article, I’m going to take a swing at deconstructing the plot of Wolfs and the ending of it.
Spoilers Ahead
What Happens in the Film?
In what should be labeled a threat-level-midnight kind of situation, district attorney Margaret (played by Amy Ryan, hence “The Office” reference) has to call up an unnamed fixer (Clooney) to fix a sexual liaison gone wrong in a hotel room. It’s not at all good for a DA to be found inside a hotel with the bloodied body of a very young man, even if it was an accident. Thankfully though, the fixer reassures her that it’s going to be handled and he’s going to make everything go away. And the man does seem like someone who knows what he’s doing, especially because he’s being played by George Clooney.
It’s not going to be that simple, though. Soon enough, there’s another man (Pitt) at their door. Apparently, he’s here to do the same job as Clooney (we’re calling them that because we never get to know their names). Pitt is hired by the hotel manager, Pam, to clean up the mess and save the hotel’s reputation. And I’m not going to go into how ethical it is to have a hidden camera in the room (through which Pam saw everything) here; it is not that kind of a movie! Anyway, despite not wanting to work with each other, Clooney and Pitt have to coordinate here for their respective clients, Margaret and Pam. The first order of business is to ensure the DA leaves and goes home like none of this has happened. Once that happens, the next most important thing is to take care of the body. Clooney has to do that while Pitt enjoys a can of soda, as Pitt’s taken up the supervisor role here. Naturally, Clooney looks miffed, but he’s skilled enough to pull it off alone. And just when you’re thinking how’s he going to take the body all the way down, you see him doing it with a luggage cart in what I believe to be one of the coolest movie scenes of the year (should make it to YouTube if Wolfs gets popular).
But here’s another big problem. There’s a funny-looking backpack in the room, most definitely belonging to the dead body. Inside the bag, there are four cakes of drugs. Clearly, the kid was supposed to hand it over to someone, and now Clooney and Pitt have to do that; otherwise it can be traced back to either the DA or the hotel or both. It’s surely going to be a challenge for Clooney and Pitt to find the man who’s supposed to receive those drugs. Well, that unexpectedly gets sorted when they realize that the dead kid is not quite dead, actually.
What role does “The Physician” play in all this?
The physician that lives in Chinatown is called June, but I’m going to address her by her profession, as that is infinitely cooler. She’s someone Pitt knows, and eventually, it’s revealed that Clooney also happens to know her. On the way to The Physician’s, Pitt receives a call that he doesn’t pick up, and in the very next moment, Clooney also receives a call, but he doesn’t pick up either. Upon reaching The Physician’s place, the kid regains his senses and runs away. Clooney and Pitt successfully bring him back, but only after a ten-minute-long, fantastically shot, hyper-dramatic chase. The Physician gives them the medicines they need for the kid, and they eventually end up at a shady motel that looks like a germophobe’s personal hell.
What’s The Kid’s Story?
The Kid has a ludicrous story about how he got the drugs in the first place, and it starts with him waking up and getting out of bed, as per his narration. Austin Abrams is hilarious here, and while Wolfs is Clooney and Pitt’s film for sure, Abrams is the best performer of the whole show. The story goes like this: The Kid is a mere business school student who hangs out with this very cool guy, Diego, who’s in his class. As fate would have it, Diego’s mother suddenly died on that very day due to a hospital mishap involving wrong medicines. Diego had no other option but to go, but he had a job to do, which was delivering that bag (full of drugs) somewhere. Since he absolutely couldn’t get it done, he asked The Kid for help, who got freaked out by the drugs but couldn’t say no given Diego’s mother just died. He also tried a little of what he had to deliver and got this incredible high and confidence boost. This led to him slipping into the bar of a posh hotel and getting wooed by attractive women, both young and old (talking about the DA here). When Clooney and Pitt ask about the location where The Kid has to deliver the drug, he mentions this place called Club Ice. That’s not where he’s supposed to deliver, though. The kid needs to acquire a green pager from the bartender, which Diego left there. The drop location will eventually be paged.
Upon reaching Club Ice, Clooney and Pitt find out that a Croatian gang wedding party is going on inside. As it so happens, they both have been involved in a botched job where they were separately hired by this gangster, Dimitri. Quite naturally, if the gangster realizes these two men know each other, then he wouldn’t hesitate to kill them. That’s just how things work in their line of work. So they enter the club, where The Kid does manage to retrieve the pager, only to be caught by bar security. Simultaneously, when Clooney and Pitt realize that they can’t avoid being seen by Dimitri, they stage a mock fight, pretending to not know each other. Dimitri appears to buy that and asks them to calm down, as the joyous occasion going inside Club Ice happens to be his daughter’s wedding party. Clooney and Pitt leave separately, while leaving their guns with Dimitri and making his bodyguard suspicious. Outside, they find out The Kid has managed to get out with the pager in his hands. However, the location hasn’t been paged yet. This follows a bit of waiting, where the fixers contemplate how to approach the situation when they reach the drop location. The obvious moral dilemma here is whether to let The Kid live or not, and they find it difficult because by now, it’s evident that they care about him. The location is eventually sent to the pager, and very conveniently, it’s a warehouse—the perfect place for dramas related to drug dealing.
Do Clooney and Pitt Die In The End?
Alright, I have deliberately not said certain things so far. But now that we’re here, I guess it’s time. Let us get back to the very beginning and focus on DA Margaret for a bit. Not only did she go to a hotel with a very young kid (the boy is over eighteen, so I’m not bringing up the p-word here), she used an alias as well. It also gets revealed in due course (not directly though) that she’s going to run in the upcoming election as well, and her goal is to eradicate crimes from the city. The crime in question here is drug dealing in particular, and the Albanians sort of have a monopoly on that. Clooney is the one who mentions them at one point, from where we realize Albanians are the ones who are running the drugs game, and anyone who tries to challenge them is going to meet their doom.
Now, the hidden camera in the hotel, through which Pam saw everything. Clooney does briefly entertain the possibility of the hotel manager deliberately trying to get the DA’s ‘secret life’ on videotape to use that as leverage against her (coming into the ‘why’ part in a while). This theory, obviously, makes Pitt an inside man. He’s called by manager Pam to make sure things get fixed, but that’s just not it. We know for a fact that there’s a guy who has given Clooney’s contact to Margaret, and then there’s this other guy from whom Pam has gotten Pitt’s number. Even though it takes Clooney a whole lot of things to finally realize that he and Pitt both have the same guy, we can sort of deduce that from the scene in the car where they both receive calls (and don’t pick up). Right after that, Pitt sees this random Asian guy sort of following him but doesn’t mention anything to Clooney. What if Pam, Pitt, and the guy who gave the DA Clooney’s number are working together? Think about it: Pam and the contact guy (that’s what we’re calling him, alright?) want to blackmail the DA, so they send The Kid to seduce her, assuming Margaret likes her dates ‘young’. The kid was supposed to do his job with Margaret and then deliver the drug to that warehouse. Except the warehouse was a trap for the Albanians. The contract guy wanted to clean up the Albanians and take control of the drug business. But he also generously wanted to give the credit to the DA while keeping her under his thumb thanks to the videotape. It was a perfect plan, until the freak accident inside the hotel room ruined it. And that’s where Clooney comes in. Obviously, Margaret wouldn’t have called the fixer had the night been a regular one. Clooney did come to help the DA, but the moment he got involved, the contact guy had to make sure that this fixer gets killed by the end. And the best way to do that was to make him deliver the drug (now that The Kid was dead) to the Albanians. But for that, Clooney needed to find the drug inside the room in the first place. That’s where Pitt steps in. He’s the one who notices the drug and brings it to Clooney’s attention. How else would the drug be discovered and then delivered? Like Clooney, Pitt was also not part of the original plan. The accident here is something that nobody saw coming, and that changed everything.
But when The Kid magically returned to life, the original plan was in motion again. The problem, though, is that Clooney is now fully involved in this. So Pitt’s job has to be making Clooney deliver the drugs instead of The Kid. This might be too far-fetched, but Pitt probably wouldn’t have minded if The Kid got away during the chase. Anyway, no matter how hard Pitt tries to convince Clooney that The Kid shouldn’t go to drop the drugs, Clooney doesn’t take the bait. The Kid goes inside the warehouse, and soon, the Albanians arrive and get inside. Pitt and Clooney see it from afar, sitting inside the car. Just when Clooney is about to take matters into his own hands, Dimitri’s bodyguard attacks him. I would like to believe this part is not quite associated with the main plot, and Jon Watts is probably messing with us. The Croatian bodyguard only attacks them because, at Club Ice, he suspected that they might know each other. He’s only here because Pitt and Clooney knowing each other is bad for Dimitri. Too bad, the Croatian and his team are no match for the seasoned fixers.
Meanwhile, inside the warehouse, the Albanians are wiped off (it was a trap anyway), and The Kid appears to be miraculously okay. Clooney points the gun at him, and at the same time, we see Pitt pointing his gun at Clooney. I think it was Pitt’s job to kill Clooney; which effectively ties up all the loose ends considering The Kid is also in on the plan. But that goes for a toss when Clooney doesn’t kill the Kid and Pitt has a change of heart. He has been quite impressed by Clooney all night (who wouldn’t?). Seeing the guy not killing The Kid makes him fall for Clooney even harder, if you know what I mean. But that also ensures the final attack in the breakfast place. For the contact guy, Clooney being alive is never good news. And now that Pitt has gone against the plan, he also needs to be taken care of. One might wonder how on earth the contact guy finds Clooney and Pitt’s location, given the drug (and the tracker) is now lying in the warehouse. In that case, I would like to ask you one simple question: why would a big name like Richard Kind do a two-minute-long role of just a concerned dad (of The Kid)? Not to mention, when Pitt and Clooney leave The Kid’s house and start talking about going for breakfast, we see Kind opening the door and overhearing them. Is he the guy that’s running the whole show? Very likely. I also think neither Pitt nor Clooney have ever seen their employer in person. Also, it makes very much sense that The Kid survived all this, given he’s Kind’s son. It can very well be The Kid purposefully taking Pitt and Clooney to the boss to let him know what’s going on, and it’s not even his father.
The final question that should come to your mind is: Are the two fixers going to survive the final attack? My bet would be yes, because there’s a great possibility of a sequel and maybe even more. It’s hard to believe Apple TV will let go of the opportunity to cash in on the charm of two superstars for some more time. Only time will tell, but I personally feel very excited thinking about it.
