Teen Wolf: The Movie review: Convoluted reboot lacks bite

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?