*SPOILER ALERT*
(2014. dir: David Hayter) Somebody started salivating over the successes of Twilight and True Blood and decided it was time to reboot Teen Wolf. Alright, fair enough. Rage and lust turn bland dreamboat quarterback BMOC (Lucas Till, a boy with a terrible sense of timing, putting pauses and stammers in all the wrong places) into a parricidal fugitive. He goes on the lam, running from himself, looking for answers, a way to exist in the world. Meanwhile, he tells us all this in really badly written narration. He finds his way to Lupine Ridge, home of... well, you know.
This doesn't remind me of other lycanthropic ventures so much as it does Renny Harlin's the Covenant. It's overstylized, particularly in the lighting, banks on its beefcake appeal, sports a badly-written and over-emphasized "we are the last of the old families" backstory, only this time it's wolves instead of witches. It's still about boys coming into their power and learning to control it, and it's still about the father issues. In this one, after eating his human parents (OK, spoiler alert! We find out in the end he didn't really; he was set up by a bad doggie. Our boy is way too nice a killer dog to do that) he seeks out his wolf-dad and they engage in to-the-death combat, ostensibly fighting over the favors of a wolf-girl. See, papa wolf wants to continue his line by mating with this last of the true wolf-girls. But, wait, our bland hero is already his son by a different, dead, true wolf-girl. That never gets addressed, though. They just start right in on killing one another. Their last name is Slaughter. Yeah, I know.
The reason to see this is for Jason Momoa, who has a killer time as Papa Bad-Dog. He and Stephen McHattie, in the obligatory avuncular role, give a good go at setting the place: the ancient hills of West Virginia. They do it with accents and strange-looking pipes. Other than that, these wolflings could be anywhere, or nowhere that exists in the real world.
Let me tell you the best parts. When Momoa's lupine uberlord undergoes his first change: we're watching him from the back as he walks forward, about to join a manhunt, and we see the supreme confidence with which he tears open his shirt, cracks his neck like he's walking onto a playing field, saunters forward. The next best part is when Hanni El Khatib sings that old New Orleans standard "You Rascal You". The best line is when our bland hero comes home half-dead and says, "I need a hospital. Or, you know, a vet or something." The other best part is when Momoa is enjoying his intended wedding night, joking around, sort of playing with his food. He's got charisma to spare, that fellow. Then there's the way all the wolfmen whimper like puppies when they take their death-blows; that's a good touch.
And fear not. It turns out, after embodying the most brutal of villains for most of the movie, on his deathbed (OK, death mud-pit) Papa Bad-Dog gives his son (who really doesn't look wolfish at all. He looks like a reject from the Lion King. No wonder dad wouldn't claim him) a song and dance about how he didn't REALLY rape lion-boy's mother; lion-boy was, in reality, a love-child. Which doesn't explain why he's spent these past two hours trying to murder the love-child. And, of course, the kid has to give the whole, anguished, "This is all your fault! You made me a monster!" rant.
To which I say wolf up, lion-boy.
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