As a fan of both the original 1985 “Teen Wolf” movie starring Micheal J. Fox and the 2011 MTV remake starring Tyler Posey and Dylan O’Brien, I was just as excited as everyone else when Paramount announced they were making a follow-up movie.
So what made this movie fail amongst new and veteran viewers? The recycled, convoluted and misplaced plot.
“Teen Wolf: The Movie” picks up 15 years after the events of the show, with the protagonist Scott McCall living in LA and using his werewolf powers to help in natural disasters.
McCall is called back to his hometown of Beacon Hills, a breeding ground for all things supernatural, when the trickster spirit, Nogitsune, is freed from the glass jar that holds it captive in Japan. McCAll has to reunite with his friends to destroy the Nogitsune once and for all. Things get a little more complicated, though, when McCall’s ex-girlfriend, Allison, is resurrected 15 years after her death with no memory of McCall.
Over the months in between its announcement and its release, the discourse around the movie quickly turned sour after it was revealed that not only would Dylan O’Brien and Arden Cho not be returning as Stiles Stilinski and Kira Yukimura. But the entire plot of the movie would be a callback to season 3b of the tv show, a season in which Stilinski and Yukimura were central to the lore and events. These two facts culminated in confusion among the fanbase and, eventually, the release of this disaster of a movie.
As far as how the absence of these two characters affected the end result, the writers’ solutions ranged from a cop-out breakup between Lydia and Stiles and a convenient set up for Eli’s characters’ entrance, to yet another instance of this franchise dropping the ball when it comes to Asian American Pacific Islander representation.
Cho’s character, who was the only major Asian American character on the original show, is seemingly replaced by Amy Workman’s character, Hikari, who is ambiguously connected to Dylan Sprayberry’s Liam Dunbar, and whose Kitsune powers randomly save Scott McCall’s life, despite the fact that she’s in the movie for what feels like a total of less than ten minutes.
Now for the less apparent, but still extremely aggravating, grievances I have with this movie. As someone who went into this movie with full knowledge of the tv show and watched the movie with my parents, who had not seen the tv show, I think it’s fair to say that we were all left confused by many things.
Allison’s resurrection is never really explained. I know the show had its own ambiguous magic system, but absolutely no one even questioned how Allison, who was in fact cremated, reappeared with her body fully intact.
Paramount gave this movie an MA rating which was used on a few awkwardly placed f-bombs and not one, not two, but three bare butts.
This movie had a lot of pointless things added to it instead of trying to successfully execute its important elements; for example Malia’s random relationship with Parrish, bringing back the science teacher, the whole “underworld” illusion, Peter sniffing the ground, Derek’s lame death, and Jackson’s whole appearance.
In the end, The Teen Wolf Movie disrespected its source materials and simply ended up feeling like a two and a half hour way to set up a spin off series, with the one bright spot being the relationship between Derek and his son Eli.
But overall I think the thing most annoying about this film was that no one ever actually turned into a werewolf and the CGI that somehow got worse since 2011.
If you’re a fan of “Teen Wolf ” and Jeff Davis or just looking for something gory to watch, skip this dumpster-fire of a movie and go watch “Wolf Pack ” which has new episodes every Thursday on Paramount+.
2/5 stars