Jason Momoa has been part of some big successful movies recently, but just over a decade ago he was part of the cast of a panned werewolf thriller that had critics howling over how bad it was. But as the festive season gets into full swing, apparently there is nothing that Tubi viewers want more than to see a quite bad horror movie that combines the gory werewolf cliché book with a coming-of-age metaphor.
Directed by David Hayter, who is better known as the voice of Solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid video games and for writing the 2000 Marvel X-Men movie, Wolves sees Cayden Richards (Lucas Till) discovering that his life as an average college student is not what he thought it was when he hurts his girlfriend and kills his parents after transforming into a werewolf. Cayden becomes a drifter and goes on a journey of discovery to find out his past.
Alongside Till and Momoa, the film stars Merritt Patterson, Jennifer Hale, Philip Maurice Hayes, Miriam McDonald, and Melanie Scrofano.
The movie was released in 2014 and became a huge box office success, turning an $18 million budget into a $491 million box office. However, while the financials may have been strong, the reviews were not. In fact, the film’s Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes sits at 16%, and although critics were not exactly complimentary, they were also strangely not overly harsh despite the low aggregate score.
‘Wolves’ was Clawed to Pieces in its Reviews
With movies like Aquaman and this year’s A Minecraft Movie, Jason Momoa has been part of many big box office hits, but that has not always translated into great reviews. Wolves is one of the movies that defied the opinion of pretty much everyone to become a huge success in cinemas. Although some critics, like Variety’s Dennis Harvey, were willing to mark the film as “a painless watch,” they also couldn’t allow the “silly and inconsistent” story to pass without comment.
Mostly, the vast majority of people agreed that Wolves was a quick 90-minute watch that was instantly forgettable for being “as unoriginal as its title.” Audience reviews were a little more positive, with the film currently holding a 33% Popcornmeter score. Some people say the film is “highly underrated,” but others say it is a “dum (sic) TV budget werewolf movie” that would have “worked better as a TV show.”
Of course, the fact that the film was a box office smash in 2014 and is now digging its claws into the free streaming chart on Tubi proves that the reviews mean very little. Perhaps Wolves is just that kind of guilty pleasure movie that ticks just enough boxes to get by. Many movies and franchises have been built on much less. Fans of werewolf movies can add this one to their list of festive viewing while it is available on Tubi to watch free with ads.
- Release Date
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August 28, 2014
- Runtime
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90 minutes
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
