Before we talk about Teen Wolf: The Movie, a little background.
I'm a huge, unabashed fan of Teen Wolf (the series). I just am. It's melodramatic and often spottily written. It makes narrative leaps that it doesn't always clue the audience into, it's often a camp-tastic mess. And I love it anyway.
I love it for the shirtless boys and for them always swinging for the fences, no matter how well they actually manage to hit the ball. When it's good, it's outstanding... when it's bad, well, it's still watchable if completely insane.
If I had to rank the individual seasons (or technically half-seasons, because there are a lot of those) from the series, it would be, as I said when I finished the series...
6A, 3B, 5, 6B, 3A... and then 1, 2 and 4 is some random interchangeable order. If I'm counting the two split seasons as a whole, then I think the ranking is 6, 5, 3, 2, 1, 4 maybe. Again, the last three are a little switchable.
Given that, I feel like Teen Wolf: The Movie possibly sits in that pocket between between what I consider the "good series" (3, 5 and 6) and the ones that can more more of a struggle (1, 2 and 4). Because parts of this are very good, other parts make literally no sense for both internal and external reasons.
Let's start with some of the external reasons first. Also, there will be spoilers.
Firstly, I feel like I was in pretty much the right position to enjoy this movie as much as possible, having just rewatched the whole series. Most of the plot points and characters are fresh in my mind and I've seen all of their shenanigans very recently. If you were coming back to this after not having watched the show for seven years, I don't know how you'd fare.
Also, minor point, but the movie does a weird little time hop thing because the actors were already in their mid to late 20's at the end of the series, playing kids just out of high school. The movie premiered seven years after the final season. In the world of the movie, 15 years have gone past. Meaning, technically, the movie takes place in 2032. Or the final season supposedly took place in 2008 (I disagree with this based on phone technology alone). It feels like maybe the movie makes a subtle reference to it being "the near future" via the character of Lydia, but also, it just does not matter and the movie does not care to expand on it. That will be a recurring theme.
The Teen Wolf wiki seems to indicate that the 2008 timeline theory is the correct one, which seems dumb to me.
Secondly, Dylan O'Brien is not in the movie. Clearly, he's a big movie star now, being among the most successful (and, let's be real, one of the best) actors of the core cast, and he decided he didn't want to do this. Whether he just didn't like the part they'd written for him, whether he just had too many other things on his schedule at the time (he had two movies come out in 2022 when this was filming) or what, he's never said as far as I know.
But Stiles is the beating heart of most of the series. And while his absence is felt it also makes sense within the context of both the movie and the last half-season where O'Brien was also mostly absent due to a serious injury.
Thirdly, the original script for this movie absolutely featured the character of Kira, played by Arden Cho. But when Cho was then offered "half the per-episode salary proposed to her three [female series regular cast members] counterparts", she declined to come back, and somebody clearly did a Copy Paste on the script, replacing Kira's name with "Hikari" (played by Amy Workman). Hikari is barely a character, is namechecked only once and the entire character is so VERY clearly Kira.
I'll also be honest, I don't completely understand why they're paying people for a movie based on a "per-epsiode salary" from the series. Maybe there was a clause in their series contracts about a movie, but that just seems shitty and dumb overall. Either pay the actors properly and consistently, or don't just Copy Paste over a character whose actor refuses to show up.
They also put this character ON THE MOVIE POSTER. What are we even doing here?
Also, this is a 160 minute movie. Compare that to a regular 10-12 episode "season arc" of 410-492 minutes. And then trying to cover a series cast of about 15 characters in that movie time means that there are characters who essentially just don't do anything or have any kind of storyline.
Colton Haynes, as Jackson, is basically turned into a comedy sidekick for Holland Roden's Lydia. I also do wonder if he was originally supposed to be Third Wheel to the more compelling story of Lydia and Stiles before O'Brien backed out of the project. It very much feels like they wrote a script quickly after the movie was greenlit (they announced it in September 2021 and started filming in March 2022) and then when people didn't want to return they did a somewhat hasty rewrite.
Dylan Sprayberry and Khylin Rhambo, whose characters were best friends in the series, don't even talk to each other I don't think. They may not even be in a scene together.
But everybody outside of Scott (Tyler Posey), Allison (Crystal Reed) and Derek (Tyler Hoechlin) are woefully under-served by this movie's plot.
And I get it, you want to serve your main couple and the character with the strongest arc/link to the newest "major" character. The downside being, for me, that I was absolutely never a Scallison fan. I was a Scira man (Scott and Kira... also, these ship names are terrible), or, to be fair, I was absolutely a Scisaac (Scott/Isaac non-canonical ship) man, or, in the actual narrative of the show, I was a Allisaac (Allison/Isaac) man. But Daniel Sharman also doesn't show up as Isaac (he also seems to have been busy doing other things) either.
I also get that having him in the movie does complicate the Scallison storyline. But then Kira would also have done that, and the movie was definitely going to throw that in.
The character with the best arc in the movie is absolutely Derek, mostly because of the relationship with his son, Eli, played by a floppy haired Vincent Mattis. Derek has never really been my favourite character, and the show definitely didn't really know what to do with him at times, but I like what they did with him here.
This is kind of the other point where the absence of O'Brien is felt. Because Eli is 100% Stiles coded from top to toe. Because of course the fandom that was Sterek (Stiles/Derek) would be on board for Derek having to deal with his son acting exactly like his non-canonical boyfriend.
Doubly so because the movie never bothers to even mention a mother. For all intents and purposes Derek gave birth to this child via immaculate conception. Or, as I will maintain in my own headcanon, this is Derek and Stiles' son via magical mumbojumbo. At a bare minimum, given that they've been gone from Beacon Hills for 15 years and this kid is 15 years old, then this child was conceived either during or directly after the final season of the show. By a mother who then handed over the child and vanished.
Movie absolutely does not care about Eli's mother or lack of same.
As far as the actual plot goes, bringing back one of the strongest antagonists from Season 3B was an excellent idea. That does slightly fall apart when you also don't bring back Cho. Because she's literally the other narrative half of that season. Bringing back Allison, sure, I get it, given that she died in that season. That's supposedly your main characters first love, the romantic ideal, etc. Except they were always slightly toxic for each other and were better apart, but sure.
The movie also does a thing that the series did entirely too much and gives us a very incestuous friend-group. At this point, Scott had been in a relationship during the series with three of the four major female characters, and kissed the fourth once. So now Malia (Shelley Hennig), who previously had hooked up with Stiles and Scott is now in a fuckbuddy relationship with Deputy Parrish (Ryan Kelley), who previously had a thing with Lydia who also had a thing with Stiles than never completely got started on-screen and has ended off-screen in the intervening years, who was, as previously mention, in some kind of relationship with Malia.
Find some new people to fuck you guys. Seriously. Or, you know, don't... just keep swapping partners when the music stops. Live your lives.
Speaking of fuck. Because this movie was going out via streaming instead of on cable, the folks from Beacon Hills can now swear. Which basically amount to, as IMDB's Parents Guide kindly reports... a "half dozen uses of 'f**k' and 's**t', as well as some other milder swears". Which, honestly, I might not really have even noticed if I'd been watching it alone.
Also, butts. The show itself had a penchant for showing us handsome young men with their shirts off for large chunks of time, and the movie gives us... two female butts and a male butt. The butts in question being Malia, Parrish and Allison. The first two make sense given that it's right before an off-screen sex scene, Allison's feels a little... unnecessary, honestly. Narratively I get it, but also, why are you making Reed show her ass.
It's also almost comedic how little skin Posey shows. And I know why. He's now COVERED in tattoos and clearly they either didn't want to slather him in makeup or he didn't want to sit in the chair for that long. But even at certain points where he should just be wearing shorts, he has a pair of full length running leggings on under them. And a long-sleeve jacket on for pretty the whole time. There is one tiny scene where he pulls up part of his shirt to show a wound, and that's it.
I will also say that there is the tiniest bit of gay-erasure in the movie. While Jackson shows up, his partner of now 16-17 years in the show's timeline, Ethan (Charlie Carver), does not (although is name-checked). However Mason, who is canonically also queer, gets flattened down to essentially "sheriff's deputy" as his only character trait. And there's no reference to either his previous love interest or a new love interest. Boo I say. I like Mason, he was always a good character. He's massively underused in the movie.
Like much of the series though, the movie has plot holes you could drive a truck through. Why does Character X who was supposed to be dead show up again with no explanation? Why did Character Y have that MacGuffin? Has nothing supernatural been happening in this town the last 15 years? Who the hell is Eli's mother? Who, exactly, made the preserved vegetables that production design added to Derek's basement? Does Derek garden now? Or is this the fictitious wife/mother? Why would you not want your mother to know you're back in town and then meet at her house? Did Scott's mother actually become a doctor?
Just a million tiny questions that the movie never bothers to address directly that could very easily have been covered.
Honestly, this should have been a mini-series. Like 3-4 90 minute episodes. So that the whole thing could just breathe and do the business it needed to do and not rush through the story.
Having said literally ALL of that. I didn't hate it. It was massively flawed, yes. Some of it actively does not work or contradicts bits that do. But the bits of it that I liked, I really liked.
Most of the stuff with Derek and Eli was great. I loved seeing Aaron Hendry back as the Nogitsune (and I didn't realise that he played that role as well as the homicidal orderly in that season of the show originally), he does fantastic work. Likewise just seeing everybody that did come back, even if they're only back for 10 minutes of actual screen time and have almost no lines.
I just enjoy this world, flawed though it absolutely is, and I very much enjoyed getting to spend just a tiny bit more time there, even if it wasn't perfect.
But sadly, I don't give half-scores in my reviews. It's full numbers or it's nothing... so I'm actually going to round-down because of the behind the scenes fuckery that clearly was going on in the production offices.
yani's rating: 2 '1980 robin's egg blue CJ5 Jeeps' out of 5
