Wolfs (2024)
Directed by Jon Watts
Hired to cover up a high-profile crime, a fixer soon finds his night spiralling out of control when he's forced to work with an unexpected counterpart.
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5 films that influenced Wolfs
What critics say influenced Wolfs
At first glance, Wolfs, the first non-Spider-Man film from director Jon Watts since 2015’s Cop Car, seems to be something of a Pulp Fiction/Quentin Tarantino riff. There’s that deliberately grammatically inaccurate title, which nods to Harvey Keitel’s character from that film, a well-dressed man who ‘solves problems’ when a dead body unhelpfully shows up. There’s a MacGuffin in a bag.
The inexplicably ugly title could be a vague reference to Mr Wolf, Harvey Keitel’s dapper ‘fixer’ from Tarantino’s 1993 zeitgeist-grabber, Pulp Fiction.
Clooney and Pitt are lone “wolf” fixers akin to the Harvey Keitel “cleaner” character in “Pulp Fiction” (known, by the way, as “The Wolf”). When a politician’s (Amy Ryan) attempted fling with a goofy young dude (Austin Abrams) goes terribly wrong, they’re separately called in to erase the incident and, despite their objections, forced to work together.
Clooney plays a fixer — one of those movie characters whom rich and powerful people use to make unseemly problems quietly go away, like Harvey Keitel's Winston Wolfe in "Pulp Fiction" — who is called upon by district attorney Margaret (Amy Ryan) when a young gentleman she had brought to her Manhattan hotel room accidentally dies after impaling himself on a beverage cart.
They’re fixers, in the manner of Harvey Keitel’s Winston “The Wolf” in “Pulp Fiction.” Margaret has hired Clooney, obviously. Pam, the owner of the hotel, has hired Pitt.
John Carpenter's "Assault on Precinct 13," Sidney Lumet's "Dog Day Afternoon," and especially Martin Scorsese's "After Hours" perfected the art of throwing every possible obstacle they could think of at their heroes, putting them through the wringer over the course of a single endless day or night.
It’s all a far cry from, say, Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang or The Nice Guys, in which their actor pairings were given sparky, distinguishable characters to inhabit – characters with actual arcs, who reveal more about themselves as their stories unfold.
From a technical standpoint, though, Wolfs looks like a proper bit of pulp cinema. Watts and cinematographer Larkin Seiple (who also shot Watts’ Cop Car) sumptuously capture Manhattan in the dead of winter, and their mix of smooth tracking shots and golden colour palette recall David Fincher’s post-Seven thrillers, including The Game and Gone Girl.
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Reminiscent of Martin Scorsese's After Hours and Benny and Josh Safdie's Good Time, what's supposed to play out like another night becomes a competition to see if either of the bickering professionals can make it to the morning.