It should be “wolves,” not Wolfs (2024). After all, today’s film starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt is about two dangerous individuals known as “fixers.” Such a term actually sounds okay, something you would not associate with criminality. That notion breaks down after some scrutiny. In a Catholic sense, no person can truly erase our problems, which is what these two leads are called to do from the start. They are also asked to solve a situation that makes people question our politicians, and I will leave it there for the moment. Let us pray that none of us will ever have to face the kinds of crises that come up throughout this movie.

The grammatical oddity of the title becomes appropriate almost immediately because Wolfs follows two men who have built their careers on working alone. Margaret (Amy Ryan), the Manhattan district attorney, is staying in an upscale hotel when a young man she met at the bar ends up apparently dead in her room after jumping on the bed and crashing through a glass drinks cart. Terrified that the scandal will destroy her career, Margaret calls a mysterious number she was once given for emergencies. An unnamed fixer (George Clooney) arrives and calmly begins arranging to make the problem disappear. His work is interrupted by another unnamed fixer (Brad Pitt), who has been sent by Pam (voiced by Frances McDormand), the unseen owner of the hotel, after hidden cameras recorded everything that happened. Margaret and Pam both need the incident concealed, forcing the two irritated professionals to work together. They send Margaret home with an alibi and begin cleaning the room, only to discover a backpack filled with drugs. Pam insists that the drugs must be returned to their owners before they create another problem. Then the fixers receive an even larger surprise when the supposedly dead young man, known simply as the Kid (Austin Abrams), turns out to be alive and suffering from an overdose. The men take him to June (Poorna Jagannathan), an underground medical specialist whom, to their further annoyance, they discover they each know. After June revives him, the nearly naked Kid bolts into the streets, forcing the two aging fixers into an exhausting chase before they finally catch him. Once he is lucid enough to talk, the Kid explains that the drugs are not his. His friend Diego (not pictured), whose mother recently died, asked him to make a delivery in his place. The Kid was waiting for the drop-off location when he met Margaret at the hotel bar, went upstairs with her, sampled the drugs, and overdosed. The delivery address will be sent to Diego’s pager, which is waiting at the nightclub where Diego works. The fixers take the Kid there, only to discover that a wedding celebration is underway for the daughter of Dimitri (Zlatko Burić), a dangerous Croatian gangster for whom the fixers have previously worked. They try to conceal the fact that they are now working together and become caught up in a traditional wedding dance while the Kid retrieves the pager. Dimitri notices them, but they manage to leave after maintaining the fiction that their simultaneous appearance is merely a coincidence. One of Dimitri’s bodyguards is less convinced and follows them. As they wait for the pager to receive the address, the fixers piece together that the drugs were probably stolen from the Albanian mafia by the organization of a dealer named Lagrange (not pictured). They also realize that the inexperienced Kid has likely been placed in the middle of a conflict he does not understand and may be walking into his own execution. Nevertheless, their job is to return the drugs and eliminate loose ends. When the address arrives, they send the Kid into Lagrange’s warehouse with the backpack while they watch from outside. Almost immediately, armed Albanians arrive and storm the building. Before the fixers can intervene, Dimitri’s men attack them as well. The two reluctant partners work together to kill their attackers and then enter the warehouse, where the Albanians and Lagrange’s men have slaughtered one another. Against the odds, the Kid has survived by hiding in the trunk of a car. The fixers initially prepare to kill him themselves, believing his death is necessary to conceal their involvement, but neither can bring himself to do it. Instead, they take him home on the subway and sternly warn both him and his father (Richard Kind) never to speak about what happened. With the night apparently over, the two fixers stop for breakfast at a Brighton Beach diner. By now, they have discovered an uncomfortable number of similarities between themselves, including their clothes, weapons, physical ailments, professional habits, and determination to remain solitary. Their conversation finally reveals the most disturbing similarity of all. Each man was persuaded to accept the joint assignment with exactly the same words about taking a job, giving one’s word, and measuring a man by that word. They realize that, despite believing they worked for different people, the same unseen employer has been directing them. Reconsidering the events of the night, they conclude that the warehouse bloodbath was intended not merely to settle the drug dispute but also to eliminate them. Looking outside, they notice armed men surrounding the diner. The two supposed lone wolfs finally accept that survival will require them to trust one another. They load their weapons and agree that, if they make it out alive, they will finally exchange names.

Wolfs ends before revealing whether they survive, as the two men open fire on the assassins waiting outside. Apparently, even professional fixers eventually encounter a problem that cannot simply be made to disappear, though they are about to do their best as a team. As you might be able to gather from the description of this plot, there is not much about it on which to hang a Catholic analysis. All the same, at one point Clooney’s character refers to the kind of attitude needed to do their job as being monastic. This is an interesting choice of words on a number of levels. First, it speaks to certain stereotypes people have about living in a religious community. It is the monasteries that practice enclosure, and those associated with silence, that tend to become emblematic of what it means to be a monk or nun. If that is the only way in which we judge such a lifestyle, then it makes some sense for the fixers to think of their lives in this manner. When we first meet Clooney’s character, he is alone at a bar, seemingly sequestered in a phone booth talking to Margaret. After he meets Pitt’s character, it comes out that they lead similarly solitary lives. Actually, what they are describing is closer to the life of hermits, though Catholic eremitical life is itself a vocation lived in relation to God and the Church rather than simple isolation. Monastic life, meanwhile, is normally communal and ordered around prayer, worship, work, obedience, and charity. What I am getting at is that the comparison is a false one because popular culture often reduces monasticism to silence and seclusion without understanding what gives that way of life its meaning. To state the obvious, one does not need to be Catholic to know that male and female religious are usually free of the kinds of sordid activities you find in this movie. Their lives are also far more full of joy than might be commonly believed. If their increasing presence on social media is any indication, many are incredible witnesses to God’s love, as they are called to be. To be clear, all this is tangential to the film. However, it is nice to see that the fixers let the Kid live.

Letting the Kid live toward the end of Wolfs is part of a plot that gets more convoluted as the story progresses. Some people like that kind of thing, but I prefer something that is a little more straightforward. If this movie has any merit, it is in seeing Clooney and Pitt work together one more time.