'TWISTERS' Isn’t a Disaster But It Won’t Blow You Away Either

Nearly 30 years after the release of Jan de Bont’s natural disaster thriller and meteoric box office hit Twister, the winds of its legacy blow once more. Swept up in the industry’s recent trend of mining intellectual property from nearly every existing franchise over the last century, Twisters emerges as a largely cynical attempt to reignite box office flames in the natural disaster genre stratosphere. Though its tracking to do some major numbers across international territories looking for an all-ages summer hit, one is left with the sinking feeling that with all the assembled talent and massive budget, we could just do so much better than this. Bolstered by the emerging talent of rising stars in the form of director Lee Isaac Chung (Best Picture nominee Minari) and current Hollywood it-guy Glenn Powell, Twisters isn’t a disaster, but it won’t blow you away either.

Characterized as a stand-alone sequel, the film is neither a remake nor a direct continuation of the 1996 classic that starred Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, but its stormy DNA is heavily felt throughout Chung’s follow-up. This is evident right from the opening scene, which re-establishes the terror of its titular weather event by wreaking tragedy upon its protagonist. Here, that protagonist is Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a salt-of-the-earth farm girl turned storm-chaser, baptized in gale wind calamity during a fateful chase. Kate, her colleague Javi (Anthony Ramos), and their ragtag team of twister-pursuing weather-heads find themselves in the path of a catastrophic F5 tornado while attempting to deploy a novel weather control mechanism. It doesn’t end well for anyone.

Five years later, Kate is living in New York as a meteorologist. Stationed behind a desk, far away from the action that rained disaster upon her and her crew, she’s sucked back into the world of storm chasing by the promise of a powerful new tracking system that could end the home-wrecking horror increasingly inflicted by tornadoes on the Oklahoma
“tornado valley” communities she grew up in. On the hunt for information alongside old pal Javi, backed up a suspicious financier, Kate encounters Tornado Wrangler Tyler Owens (Powell), a cocksure cowboy who chases down twisters for his YouTube channel to do things like “shoot fireworks up their asses.” As Kate learns more about her new employer and her competition, she hopes to simultaneously resolve the guilt eating away at her and prevent future tragedies from striking other families, forging unlikely alliances and new friendships along the way.

As an effects-driven spectacle flick, Twisters only mildly raises the adrenaline. Its visuals feel more like a class-2 hurricane than the F5 tornado it desperately wants to emulate. Whether it’s the passable but unremarkable CGI that fails to deliver original, memorable set pieces, or the lack of innovative weather effects that don’t make the eponymous twisters any scarier or more threatening just less tactical and more computer-engineered, Twisters doesn’t feel like an upgrade. Ironically, in trying to go bigger, the film ends up sucking the air out of itself – much like when a pair of twin tornadoes battle for the characters’ attention. As Kate notes, only one can survive while the other will burn out. No moment in Twisters tops the sheer heart-stopping impact of even the original Twister’s harrowing opening sequence. Chung’s film also suffers from cloaking its main characters in plot armor, with the physics of the twisters seemingly behaving differently for them whenever they put their lives at stake.

The leads themselves are solid, fleshed out just enough to avoid being mere cardboard cutouts swept away by the tempest. The chemistry between Powell and Edgar-Jones is particularly well-tuned, marking another swirling ascent in Powell’s upward-spiraling career. His backcountry, yeehaw attitude powers much of Twisters’ own charisma but it’s never enough to overpower its otherwise disappointing sense of weather movie cliché. The addition of supporting cast members Sasha Lane, Tunde Adebimpe, and Katy O’Brian hints at an attempt to extend the charm beyond the leads; each does what they can with the material they’re given, but it mostly feels like tilting at windmills. This is largely due to the rather flat script from Mark L. Smith, known for such cinematic flatlines as The Boys in the Boat, the American Martyrs remake, The Midnight Sky, and The Marsh King’s Daughter. Smith’s script is undoubtedly elevated by Chung’s direction, which tries to ground the story in character and emotional honesty, and a hardworking cast, but its stale dialogue and borrowed plotting frequently keeps the sequel from truly taking off.

CONCLUSION: Glenn Powell, Daisy Edgar-Jones, and Anthony Ramos do their best to back director Lee Isaac Chung in recapturing the epic scale of this legacy sequel, but ‘Twisters’, blown off course by a middling script and only passable effects and forgettable set pieces, just doesn’t have enough wind in its sails to be more than a somewhat serviceable blockbuster. Like the center of a tornado, ‘Twisters’ just feels hollow.