‘Wolfs’ is mid, but in a good way

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If you remember the James Cameron Aliens pitchyou can probably imagine how Wolfen came to be. That’s essentially the entire premise: George Clooney and Brad Pitt play dueling fixers, a la The Wolf Pulp Fictionwho show up to solve the same problem. Do you get it? They are lone wolves. Only they are together, which is not what lone wolves should be. Hence: ‘Wolves’. It’s a tricky plural, just like these two!

Okay, maybe James Cameron’s story (Strangerplus an S at the end where he drew lines through it to make a dollar sign) is the better explanation. Regardless, Clooney and Pitt haven’t worked together since the release Oceans trilogy ending in 2007, and their only scene together Burning after reading (2008), so when you put them back together you can easily crochet them. Famous people we like separately, working together. Wolfen writer/director Jon Watts directed three Spider Man films for Marvel, so he clearly understands the commercial calculus of “more famous people better.”

The interesting thing about it Wolfenand ultimately probably its saving grace, is that it is carefully founded. One stylistic choice that made Soderbergh popular in the United States Ocean‘s films—zooming the film’s timeline from exploration to heist and back again with snappy montages—have spawned countless lesser imitators, most of them boring. It’s harder to invest in the stakes of a scene when you’re constantly jumping in and out of it and glossing over so many details. The present tense is where the tension is, and that’s almost entirely true Wolfen takes place. The here and now, without tricks. It’s not fancy, but it works.

Meanwhile, Clooney and Pitt both shy away from shtick, much more so than in the Ocean movies (remember when Pitt’s character was always eating?) or even Burning after reading (which is one of my most referenced films, but can never be called understated). Just looking at the poster, you expect the kind of winks and grins that for the most part (thankfully) never come. Wolfen It ends up feeling like a sturdy yarn, well spun. It’s a neat little beefy throwback that utilizes every ounce of its stars’ charm, and could easily be called ‘middle’.

But am I the only one? fog “Middle?” A film that aims for a tight 90 and achieves it is something to be celebrated. (Fine, Wolfen is actually 108 minutes, but mentally it is barely 90).

The Situation: A Manhattan prosecutor, played by Amy Ryan, finds herself in her penthouse hotel suite with a dead body – a child she picked up from the hotel bar, who took some drugs and then moved from bed to a glass bar cart fallen, bleeding all over the body. hardwood and her neat blouse. What to do? She calls a mysterious number in her phone, represented only by two brackets and nothing in between. Before she can say “room service,” George Clooney is at her door in a smart turtleneck. He begins to grumpily assess the situation. But sooner He can say ‘Chappaquiddick’, a rival fixer in the form of Brad Pitt, who wears the same amount of leather and with her even more tastefully messy appears for one dueling research. (Wolves? More like Silver Foxes!)

Clooney works for Amy Ryan’s character, the district attorney; Pitt wants a voice on the other end of the hotel phone, the hotel manager, who wants to keep this whole thing quiet for the sake of her hotel’s good reputation. IMDB lists Clooney as ‘Margaret’s Man’ and Pitt as ‘Pam’s Man’. Pam quickly decides that now that they are both aware of the situation that all parties were hoping to keep quiet, the two should simply work together. The running joke is that even though the two never met or knew of each other’s existence, they have the exact same job and are the exact same type of guy. The other running joke is that they keep referring to a “dead prostitute” while Amy Ryan keeps insisting “he’s not a prostitute!” (Classic piece).

Amy Ryan is one of the few actors still alive capable of convincingly playing a maternal woman horny enough to pick up a drunk kid half her age for sex, without it seems creepy or strange or makes you suspect that something else is going on. Wolfen is essentially a film about loneliness, and few can feel as lonely as Amy Ryan. She’s only in the movie for about five minutes and you wish it was more. But when is not Is that true for an Amy Ryan role?

Soon, wouldn’t you know it (and I don’t think this is spoiling too much), on the way to getting rid of a body, the body wakes up. Clooney and Pitt soon find themselves embroiled in a rapidly escalating situation involving a drug courier, four kilos of stolen drugs and the Albanian mafia (it’s always someone from the Balkans, right?) It’s as if screenwriters think the Soviet villains of The Cold War and the Islamic villains of the War on Terror are both crazy and so they split the difference). As good as Clooney and Pitt are as frenemy fixers, and Amy Ryan as a horny lonely career woman, Austin Abrams could steal the show as a kid so stupid and in so much over his head that you can’t help but sympathize. it. He ends up wearing women’s clothes meant for Amy Ryan for half the film, and the fact that they roughly fit makes him all the more pitifully a fool. He looks like a sad ostrich.

If dueling fixers is the solution, WolfenThe main trope is that two overtly selfish, amoral anti-heroes seem to be building themselves up to do something good for once in their lives, possibly as a final act of redemption. They are bad guys who choose to be good; guys who hate each other become friends! These are tropes for a reason: they’re fun to watch. It’s easy to bash Wolfen because they haven’t done anything ‘new’, because they don’t have more time for the female characters, or because they aren’t ‘romping around’ enough. But balance and self-control are the main reasons why it works, and why it’s a rare treat these days. It’s a slick premise that succeeds simply by being clever enoughand because you have never overextended your willful suspension of faith.

Clooney and Pitt play two impossibly cool, off-the-grid career criminals of the sort the movies have consistently conditioned us to believe exist (if Touch man did everything rightit was shattering that mythos). The twist is there WolfenBeneath the surface, these two are also lonely guys who are aging without much to show for it, complete with sore backs (a plot point I love).

This is what all good pulps do: start with a splashy, tropey, possibly even slightly high-concept premise, and then gradually turn the realism dial until you find yourself participating. As Don Draper says in the first episode of Crazy menWhat people want most is to be convinced of what they are already doing is actually Good. Good pulp writing helps you come to terms with a premise you wanted to believe in in the first place. Two cool guys become friends; Why couldn’t does it happen?