Teen Wolf: The Movie recalls the successes and failures of the series and why it has failed

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In the scene immediately preceding the opening credits of Teen Wolf: The Movie, The doctor. Deton (Seth Gilliam) talks to a firefighter about his protégé, Scott McCall (Tyler Posey), who has been working as a dog handler since the end of the original series, especially when the animals are involved in emergency situations. “We call it Alphasays Deaton. “Like a dog“observes the (cunning) fireman. “No, like a wolf”, replies the doctor, pointing to the entrance to the thunderous wake of Dino Meneghin and colorful graphics that mimic the silhouettes of werewolves. Oh how I miss it teenage wolf!

The shameless sensibility of the series has been lacking since it left the small screen in 2017, after six seasons that have progressively proven (in narrative and aesthetics) outside the box. In its best moments, the screenplay of Jeff Davis is the same as the opening of Teen Wolf: The Movie leaves wide open: catchphrases worthy of 80s action movies, chained together to form something that even vaguely resembles a plot, leaving room for fantastic concepts and delirium/dream scenes that allow the director Russell Mulcahy do your magic.

Australian Mulcahy has signed on for 40 episodes (out of a total of 100) of teenage wolf, and his return to the feature film is more timely than the return of any of the original cast members. In her hands, Teen Wolf: The Movie is made with the same distorted camera angles, the same unconditional love for dry ice machines, the same obsession with high-contrast photography, the same disregard for the “epic” and the “realistic”, the same commitment unlimited for poor staging. and square that made the series so fascinating – “bad” only because we cling too much to a short-sighted academicism that wants to limit and define what is “good” in cinema and TV.

It’s worth noting that Mulcahy has nearly 50 years of experience in the art of giving such scholarship the middle finger. Since the mid-1970s, she has produced more time-defining work than anything nominated for an Academy Award in those years. First it was the music videos, where Mulcahy basically invented 80s, directing from “the eyes of Bette Davis” The “REAL“, in “River” The “Total eclipse of the heart“… anyway, if Stranger things he has an aesthetic to refer to, it’s all his fault. Then, in founding works of genre cinema: The razor cut for creature movies, mountaineer for action epics high concept, The shadow for alternative comic book adaptations.

His work of over a decade in teenage wolf it adds to that legacy and, in a sense, avenges it. The popularity of the series, its emergence in recent years as a generational marker and its return to feature film format all validate the notion that Mulcahy’s very particular vision is deeply connected to the pulse of pop culture, and that telling such a story , based on an artificiality largely rejected by Hollywood’s prestige establishment, it works. In fact, it works so well that it even helps us overlook some silly flaws in Davis’ script.

Teen Wolf: The Movie he doesn’t care much about this business of “justifying” his existence. What he really does is find an excuse to bring back the original characters, rescuing long-forgotten villains so that Scott needs to return to Beacon Hills and reunite his supernaturally powerful friends, including former Alpha Derek.Tyler Hoechlinconsistently the best thing about the movie), the banshee lydia (Holland Roden), the coyote Malia (Shelley Hennig) and a variety of other familiar faces. Oh, and that villain’s plan also conveniently includes resurrecting Allison (Crystal Cane), Scott’s ex-girlfriend, who returns with no memory and determined to hunt werewolves.

It serves as an exercise in nostalgia for fans of the series, of course, and as a deft space for some actors to indulge their cheerier instincts — we’re looking at you (and saying “great job”!), Ian Bohen. At the end of the third act, Davis still finds genuine emotional resonance in the relationship between Derek and his son Eli (Vince Mattis), which deals, perhaps even unintentionally, with the monstrous aspect of paternal protection, how much we fear it in childhood and how this fear can distance us, for better or for worse, from the elements we have inherited from our family.

Teen Wolf: The Movie it doesn’t quite know how to weave this bump into the thematic complexity and silliness of its (unnecessarily complicated) main plot. Davis is a screenwriter unable to break his own vicious circles, and even less willing to abandon the conventional structures that no longer make sense for the franchise. The story’s non-white characters continue to feel alarmingly disposable, and it’s strange to see how this film, excessive at its 2.20 hour runtime, can easily be broken up into three episodes with their own climaxes.

If the reboot had come as a linear TV miniseries, maybe that would have made sense. In the feature-length and streaming format, where there is no traditional chunking that leaves room for commercials, a script stuck with these drawbacks only gets in the way of enjoyment. But teenage wolf it was never perfect, and its grace never would be. Instead, the film represents the survival of a pop narrative on the verge of extinction, which hides in its formalistic flights the desire to have fun in the most elementary sense of the term. It is art in its most vulgar form, beauty in its most pragmatic function, and entertainment in its most traditional definition.

If some narrative misalignment is the price to pay for continuing to have cinemas and TVs of this type, I have only one thing to say: send them teenage wolf 2 soon!