Wolfs (film): It's ok, but a lot of the humor seems forced and unnecessary

This is the story about a couple of fixers, which are people that you call when you can't call the police, to take care of something that needs to be done with absolute discretion. All of the time these things they are are illegal and only very well connected individuals with a very specific set of skills can do a job like this. The people also need to be loners without much in the way of social contact or commitments so that they can remain on the job and focused until the job is done.

So that is the story of Brad Pitt and George Clooney's joint project Wolfs, but I believe there is another intention here and that is to have something dark that has some tinges of comedy in it as well because as you know, Clooney and Pitt aren't exactly famous for the humorous roles and therefore this doesn't really work as well as I think Apple would have hoped. A lot of the time the humor seems a bit forced and uncomfortable and this film is also a showcase of how two aging stars are still very good-looking. This was always going to be a success because you can't put those two names on something together and have it fail.

The film starts out with a rich woman in a bad position that calls upon a person she has never met to clean up a scene for her in an expensive hotel room. She has a high position in society and word like this cannot get out about her. She has never used this number but it was given to her one day by someone that just told her if she needed something bad cleaned up, to call this nameless person. We never do get a name for him at any point throughout the film and I suppose that was some sort of artistic decision.

Anyhooo, while the Clooney-played fixer is getting started on the job another fixer turns up to also do the job but both Clooney and the woman who called him have no idea who he is or why he would be there. It is later revealed that he (Pitt) was called by some other party and this is all pointed out to us very quickly at the start of the film and therefore I don't consider this a spoiler at all. I mean, we knew they would be in the film together just because of the movie poster, right?

The two of them immediately start to butt heads and this sort of tension that exists between them is funny for a while but it starts to get a bit old after the same sort of "i'm better than you... naa naa naah!" joke gets recycled over and over and over again.
Some action is created when the deal they are doing starts to go awry and they are forced to work together in order to "fix" it. The whole scenarios just gets more and more crazy until eventually they sort it out... no big surprise there.

The movie premise is kind of cool and I wish that we would have more films about fixers out there because if this profession exists, and I would imagine that it does, it would be kind of nice to step into the lives of someone that does something like this for a living. I also wonder if the name of the movie Wolfs was chosen as an homage to Quentin Tarantino's "Wolf" that was played by Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction.

However, I regret to say that the chemistry really simply isn't there between Pitt and Clooney, perhaps because they are both such mega-stars that it would be very difficult to get both of these guys to do a sort of buddy comedy when as far as I know, neither of them have done something like this before.

Apparently, this film's budget is mired in mystery, with Apple not being willing to disclose how much was spent making it. It is rumored that it cost anywhere from $85 to $200 million to make and if the higher figure is even close to accurate I have to wonder what the hell they spent it on? I mean, there's a couple of good car chase scenes and one or two big battles but these don't constitute that sort of expenditure. I have long stated that I believe that to some degree all of these streaming services are money laundering ventures and all the companies intentionally overstate something that cannot be verified or denied because how much do films actually cost? Japan and Korea film budgets have me believing that the figures coming out of Hollywood are grossly overstated but I guess nobody cares.

That's a rant for another day though. Wolfs is reasonably entertaining but it is completely lacking in originality and the intended humor just really didn't resonate with me. The 6.5 rating they have on RT is right on the money in this case. I can see no real reason to go out of your way to see this, but it makes for decent background noise if you are cleaning your living room while it is on.

Should I watch it?

I think that if you have access to everything the way that I do than you may as well if you can get it on but I can't imagine any compelling reason for someone to subscribe to AppleTV+ specifically for this one title. I mean, it is entertaining at times but for the most part the petty bickering between the two unnamed Wolfs just starts to get on my nerves, and I presume other people's, after the 20th minute or so. That being said the action is good and the characters are ok, as implausible as the scenarios that they find themselves in are, they are reasonably entertaining but not exceptional.