‘Twisters’ Offers Tempestuous Weather and Tepid Love (Review)
Glen Powell rides the whirlwind as the best thing in "Twisters," a storm-chasing sequel only mildly as thrilling as the original.
In 1996, the original Twister stormed the summer box office, winding up as the year’s second-highest-grossing movie (behind Independence Day). Directed by Jan de Bont, who was still riding high off the success of Speed, Twister was loud, action-packed, and, especially when viewed today, utterly of its time.
It’s totally ’90s Hollywood, from the treacly, faux-Spielberg score, to the glow of Helen Hunt’s movie stardom, to the fact that the only non-white cast member among dozens of characters has just a single incidental line. There was plenty that filmmakers might do differently with a sequel.
But there was one aspect worth repeating: the storm-tossed intensity of the action, presented with run-and-gun urgency, and shot and edited with the dexterity of a filmmaker who had cut his teeth as a cinematographer on action bangers like Die Hard.
That cow-spinning, edge-of-your-seat excitement is what’s largely missing from Twisters, directed by Lee Isaac Chung. Chung, riding high off the success of his excellent, Oscar-nominated 2020 indie drama Minari, seems a daring choice to helm a $200-million-budgeted studio tentpole.
The bet pays off in terms of Twisters feeling grounded in real world consequences, where tornadoes aren’t just great video content for storm-chasing yahoos, but are terrible monsters of nature that decimate whole communities. Yet, the film’s disaster mayhem remains fairly low-key — save for a suspenseful sequence of a twister whipping through an oil refinery on its way to walloping a small town.
Often in those scenes, with cyclones bearing down on a town, or, as in one scene, bum-rushing a rodeo, Chung keeps the camera on the characters cowering in fear, when really we want to see twisters whipping up destruction. There’s a balance between relishing the devastation, and caring for the characters in danger, and this movie misses it.
The balance also seems off in the casting. The story is built around meteorology expert Kate Carter, who, years after losing almost her entire field crew to a twister, is pulled back into storm chasing for a good cause. Played by top-billed Daisy Edgar-Jones, best known for TV roles in British series Normal People and Cold Feet, Kate is ostensibly the hero of Twisters.
Yet, Edgar-Jones is consistently outshined by co-star Glen Powell as the self-proclaimed “Tornado Wrangler” Tyler Owens, a good ol’ boy from Arkansas in a ten-gallon cowboy hat. Had the movie twisted midway to focus instead on just Tyler and his quirky, diverse crew of storm hounds — including Nope‘s Brandon Perea and Love Lies Bleeding star Katy O’Brian — that would have been fine by me.
But we’re stuck with dour Kate, who is still mourning her crew, and is ambivalent about getting back in the storm-chasing game, and is seemingly oblivious to the fact that Tyler, somehow, starts falling for her staid, unfunny self as their separate crews race around Oklahoma looking for twisters.
In one scene, Tyler silently takes her in, realizing she might be the girl of his dreams. Powell — talk about movie star glow — conveys the instant that Tyler starts to see this woman not as competition but as a kindred spirit. Cut to Edgar-Jones’ Kate, not seeing or feeling the same things, and, more importantly, not giving us the twinkle of anything that Tyler would find so enchanting.
Beyond intelligence and beauty, we need to see star quality, and Edgar-Jones doesn’t bring that “It” factor. That’s an issue when she’s the center of a romantic triangle that also includes Anthony Ramos as storm scientist Javi, a survivor of the disaster that took her previous crew.
Equipped with a military prototype radar system he hopes to use for more accurate and useful imaging of how twisters form, Javi comes calling for Kate’s help. “You have a gift,” he tells her, trying to recruit her to his new team, co-led by stickler Scott, played by upcoming big-screen Superman David Corenswet (who looks super, though Scott is an asshole).
Javi and Scott have a deep-pocketed sponsor and the right tech, but their team needs Kate and her gift for reading the winds, like some ancient sage, discerning which way storms will blow. As demonstrated by her highly gifted method of tossing dandelion seeds into the breeze, she’s “the only one” who can get them close enough to twisters to deploy the equipment.
What Kate wants is to use the tech to figure out how to shut down storms and save lives. That appears to be what Javi wants, too. Like Kate, he also has a redemption arc here, and it’s more compelling than his pining for her. Although, the love triangle angle does provide maybe the movie’s best sight gag, a slow motion shot of both guys running to Kate’s aid.
There’s a version of this movie where Tyler and Javi just keep running, past Kate, into each other’s arms, driving off into the sunset in Tyler’s comically large Ram pickup. Perhaps in another thirty years, we’ll get a Twisters with a real twist.
Twisters (★★☆☆☆) is rated PG-13, and is playing in theaters everywhere. Visit www.fandango.com.
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