Wolfs (2024)
Directed by Jon Watts
No — Wolfs is not woke, scoring 13 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
Jon Watts has assembled two movie stars, a hotel room, a corpse that refuses to stay dead, and a great deal of banter, and from these parts he has built a machine that hums along pleasantly for a hundred minutes.
Consciousness Markers
The cast includes Poorna Jagannathan, Zlatko Burić, and other non-white performers in supporting roles, but their presence is natural to the story and never foregrounded as a statement.
Amy Ryan's District Attorney and Frances McDormand's unseen hotel owner wield real power and orchestrate the plot, but the film offers no feminist thesis or commentary.
The film is a breezy, banter-driven throwback with no preachy messaging or moral instruction.
No LGBTQ+ characters, themes, or subtext appear anywhere in the film.
Race is never a subject or theme; the film is a star-driven crime caper with no racial commentary.
No environmental or climate content whatsoever.
The film is a slick genre exercise about professional fixers; it contains no critique of wealth, class, or capitalism.
No body-positivity themes or messaging are present.
No neurodivergent characters or themes are depicted.
The film is a contemporary fictional crime story with no historical subject matter to revise.
Why it received this score
Jon Watts has assembled two movie stars, a hotel room, a corpse that refuses to stay dead, and a great deal of banter, and from these parts he has built a machine that hums along pleasantly for a hundred minutes. Wolfs is a throwback in the truest sense. It wants to be a 1970s fixer picture filtered through the Ocean's films, and it mostly gets there. The pleasure lives in the rhythm of Clooney and Pitt needling each other while a body slides off a luggage cart. Nothing more is asked of us, and nothing more is offered.
The film's relationship to social consciousness is incidental. Two women, a District Attorney and a hotel owner, set the entire plot in motion and hold real leverage over the men doing the cleaning, which is a mildly encouraging arrangement for anyone keeping score. Their authority is never framed as a statement. It is simply how the story works. The supporting cast includes performers of several backgrounds, and the film treats them as people rather than as announcements. Race is not a subject here. Neither is class, though the story unfolds among the wealthy and could have said something about them if it wanted to. It does not want to.
What remains is craft. The script is light on moral instruction, heavy on double-crosses, and content to let a kolo dance break out in a nightclub for no reason beyond the fact that it looks good. The ending arrives mid-gunfight, which is either confidence or exhaustion. This is a slick, agreeable, faintly empty exercise in watching two men in nice coats be competent. There are worse ways to spend an evening. There are also more meaningful ones, and the film has no interest in arguing the point.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
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.
Questions about Wolfs
Is Wolfs woke?
No — Wolfs is not woke, scoring 13 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does Wolfs have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Representation Casting at 25.
How does Wolfs compare to other 2024 movies?
It ranks #115 of the 189 films from 2024 we've scored; their average is 22. The wokest is The Six Triple Eight (92).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.