Teen Wolf: The Movie review: Convoluted reboot lacks bite
Scott McCall and his wolf pack return in a Paramount + project that's bogged down by complicated mythos and extensive fan service
Film Reviews Teen Wolf
Photo: Curtis Bonds Baker/MTV Entertainment
Teen Wolf: The Movie is many things, but despite veteran director Russell Mulcahy’s brisk professionalism, a movie is not one of them. Like the series it’s based on, this fantasy project about werewolves and demons and reawakened intellectual property has the rhythm of an old-school TV soap, with most scenes ending on a note of irresolution or incompletion. It’s shot like TV, too, in basic master scene coverage that’s occasionally punctuated by a jump scare or a fight.
But Teen Wolf: The Movie has lots of virtues, at least if you’re Paramount+ and maybe a little desperate for streaming product. It’s a back-door pilot and a soft reboot, as well as a sequel. To Teen Wolf season 3, to be precise.
You remember Teen Wolf (or maybe you don’t). An MTV original series from the mid-’00s set in a supernatural universe of teenage angst, it was only pulling in around half a million viewers a week when it left the air six years ago—or roughly the same audience as the CW’s improv comedy show Whose Line is It Anyway? Like virtually everything ever made at this point, Teen Wolf has its diehard fans. But it’s hardly a universally loved cultural milestone, which isn’t stopping Paramount+ from doubling down on Teen Wolf content. Paramount+ subscribers have not one but two new werewolf projects to ponder: Teen Wolf: The Movie, plus Teen Wolf series creator Jeff Davis’ new werewolf show Wolf Pack, which he swears is its very own thing.
Teen Wolf: The Movie concerns the further misadventures of nerd-turned-werewolf Scott McCall (Tyler Posey, who looks mostly unchanged) and his misfit pals in Beacon Hills, a small town beset by supernatural occurrences in the same way Moby Dick was beset by harpoons. This resurrected series is a revival about revival: Scott, his Banshee friend Lydia (Holland Roden), and his former girlfriend Malia (Shelley Hennig) get tricked into bringing Scott’s werewolf hunter ex Allison (Crystal Reed) back from the dead as part of a larger plot to revive the Nogitsune—the Big Bad from Teen Wolf Season 3. The Nogitsune wants to revive the Oni—ghost ninjas drawn to the same demonic nine-tailed fox that manga/anime superstar Naruto used to get so worked up about on his TV shows.
Add in about a dozen major characters with intense backstories the movie doesn’t even try to explain and you have a recipe for something other than clarity; to call Teen Wolf: The Movie’s storyline tangled is to insult knotted hair. After six seasons of borrowed elements from Norse, British, Irish, Japanese, Native American, and Eastern European folklore, Teen Wolf has become a premise not just clogged by surplus mythos but constipated with it. If the Druid cultists won’t get you, the ghostly ninja fighters will.
Still, and at the risk of hyper-alliteration: Please pause to pity poor Paramount+. In a superhero-crazed era, they’re streaming’s poor relations. So when they decided to get in the game by launching a superhero project, what did the streaming service find in its corporate cupboard to reinvigorate and retcon?
Teen Wolf, so it seems.
You’re probably thinking: “He called Teen Wolf a superhero show. It’s a gothic horror series. Werewolves. Banshees. Hellhounds. Monster stuff.”
Kinda sorta in a sense. But Teen Wolf rigorously follows the well-worn Buffy The Vampire Slayer template (fun fact: Sarah Michelle Gellar is the marquee star of Davis’ Wolf Pack). Both Buffy and Teen Wolf use horror conceits to fuel a superpowered teen action series. Each show places a squad of misfit teens in a world of supernatural threats where everyone uncovers their inner superbeing, then they take on similarly superpowered villains.
It’s superhero stuff, in everything but name. That’s why post-Buffy show creator Joss Whedon got to create Marvel’s Avengers series and vaporize the DC Snyderverse before, of course, public opinion vaporized Whedon.
What’s perversely admirable about Teen Wolf: The Movie is that it really doesn’t give a howl in the moonlight about whether the uninitiated viewer can even understand the density of the character relationships that built up like plaque on Scott McCall’s fangs during the show’s original run. When we last saw True Alpha Werewolf Scott McCall, he’d gotten over the death of Werewolf Hunter Allison Argent by finding true love with Evolved Beta Werecoyote (that isn’t a typo) Malia Tate. That Happily Ever After moment apparently dissolved sometime in the last six years; it’s brushed aside here with an abrupt and unexplored “Well this is awkward” when Scott and Malia re-meet, and nothing more.
Jeff Davis’ Teen Wolf: The Movie screenplay proves he knows his characters well enough to sketch them in his sleep, and director Russell Mulcahy started the whole fake mythos thing with his breakthrough movie Highlander all the way back in 1986. Such veterans persist in show business because they’re reliable, not because they’re inspired. So Teen Wolf: The Movie does what it sets out to do, and that is to finally create the work of pure and unadulterated fan service the whole industry has been struggling toward for about 10 years. In such an atmosphere of arid professionalism, the fundamental question becomes whether this was a goal worth achieving. The answer will vary from viewer to viewer, probably based on their tolerance for convoluted lore. So decide for yourself, though you’ll probably need access to the Teen Wolf Wiki when you do.
(Teen Wolf: The Movie premieres on Paramount+ on January 26.)
20 Comments
No Stiles? No thanks.
You’re probably not old enough to remember this but there already was a Teen Wolf movie prior to the MTV reboot. So essentially you have a movie that got a made for TV sequel and was rebooted into an MTV series that then got rebooted into yet another movie.
On the other hand, at least it doesn’t (presumably) have any scenes as blatantly homophobic as the one in the original Teen Wolf movie where Scott tells Stiles he’s a werewolf.
With no fan fave Stiles?
Such veterans persist in show business because they’re reliable, not because they’re inspired. Ouch! You’re not wrong, though.
Russell Mulcahy got off a strong start with RAZORBACK, and RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION is probably the best of the RE sequels, but otherwise he seems these days to focus on doing workmanlike TV shows. At least it’s regular work!
Does… does the writer even know that the Teen Wolf TV show was loosely based on the Teen Wolf movie? Am I that out-of-touch?
You remember Teen Wolf (or maybe you don’t). An MTV original series from the mid-’00sNot enough Michael J. Fox love amongst the millennials!
Didn’t even do his research properly. Claimed it was from the mid-’00s, when in fact it didn’t start until 2011. xD
I didn’t even know either way. 1985 was just on my mind.
I came here to say this. Worse, though, are the movie producers pretending they don’t know about it.
I don’t think the show even knows it’s based on the Michael J Fox movie.
MTV original series lmao
Scott McCall and his
wolf pack return in a Paramount + project that’s bogged down by
complicated mythos and extensive fan serviceThere shouldn’t be a space before the plus sign.
If there’s no basketball then it’s not Teen Wolf.
Believe it or not, I totally forgot Scott and Malia were together toward the end of the show. I remember Malia and Stiles (despite it never worked) but I think the last season was so bad that I erased all memories of it from my mind.Anyway, the movie is useless. It’s not like Teen Wolf was suddenly canceled, Jeff Davis had plenty of time to end the show properly and he gaves us a poor final season. So now what? And Stiles isn’t even here while he became somehow more popular than Scott. Dylan O’Brien made the right choice by refusing to be part of this non-sense, he felt it was a bad idea and there were no good reason to do it.
This is missing the biggest thing…that the movie is missing the best thing about the series…Dylan O’Brien. Now its just mostly bad actors doing their thing. Sure they brought back Crystal Reed, but I’m sure its thankless role, like most of the female characters tended to be.
Its obvious that Ray Greene knows nothing about the show and its characters when it was on TV which started in 2011 by the way, then he goes on to talk about how when Scott moved on from Allison he gets together with Malia Tate and when they meet again Nothing. Well Gary there would be nothing because Scott never dated Malia, they had no relationship accept being friends, you see Malia had a relationship with Scott’s friend Styles, Yup. Maybe before you do a review you should do some home work and actually know what your talking about that’s how you become a good reviewer. Your review was crap, it was off and you did not even know What went on in the TV show. If you don’t know then don’t review. So next time Gary learn about what your reviewing.I give your review a D-
Is Tyler Posey going to do an Onlyfans stream while jerking off to promote the movie?
I hope so…
I am the rare Teen Wolf super fan who was the perfect age when it aired to get hooked and love it but still realize it was never a great show. That’s not to say that the show didn’t have stuff that was awesome. Dylan O’Brien was incredible and I still maintain that the Nogitsune season was actually a good season of television. However, I’m assuming me and anyone who loved the show didn’t really care about the mythology or the plot, which rarely made sense, too much. The characters and their relationships was the entire appeal of the show. Sadly, it seems the writer of this either didn’t watch the show or somehow missed that. Clearly this movie misses Stiles in a lot of ways, but it’s an infinitely better close for these characters than the last season was. To me, that’s all this movie needed to be. There are callbacks, winks to the audience, and returning characters. That’s all you can really ask for out of a movie for a super niche fan base. I can’t understand why someone would watch this if they weren’t a fan of the show, which is why I can’t understand why there being a barrier for entry is the complaint of this review. It’s a garbage movie for anyone who wasn’t a Teen Wolf fan. If, like me you consider yourself a part of the Pack and just missed seeing these characters on your screen, it’s awesome and I’d highly recommend committing to the insane 2 and a half hour run.