‘Twisters’ Review

‘Twisters’, Lee Isaac Chung’s sequel to the 1996 blockbuster, opens on Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), and her team of storm-chasing, college student meteorologists tracking a small tornado in Oklahoma. Their experiment is to see if releasing some special beads into the tornado can absorb the tornado’s water and essentially kill it. Everything is fun and light, until the tornado intensifies unexpectedly and the characters find themselves in a fight for survival.

Despite its best efforts, going bigger and louder over the course of its two hour runtime, ‘Twisters’ never quite matches the dramatic stakes of its opening sequence. We pick up five years later with Kate, traumatized from the events in the opening scene, now working in New York City. That is, until one of those friends from her past, Javi (Anthony Ramos), tracks her down and offers her an opportunity to try her experiments again, with unlimited funding and resources from his mysterious employer.

So Kate returns to Oklahoma, working with Javi’s team, where she meets Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), an internet famous storm chaser, who seems to have no scientific interest in the tornadoes, just a thrill seeking attitude and an aura of invincibility. Of course like any classic Hollywood romance, Kate and Tyler are immediately at odds. She is disgusted with his cavalier attitude and shameless self promotion, while he is intrigued by her tornado intuitions and passion. Of course, they end up having more in common than Kate wants to believe at first, and their growing relationship is the human core of the film.

Glen Powell has cornered the market on a certain kind of character: the lovable douchebag. The movie wakes up and embraces its fun as soon as he steps on to the screen, exuding charisma and chemistry with every other actor. When we meet him, he is arrogant and cocky, attractive but so performative that we want to hate him. And yet … there’s something about his charming persistence that eventually breaks down all our initial misgivings.

As the main character, Daisy Edgar-Jones gives a quiet but believable performance. She plays off of Powell’s loudness, and delivers a character who is both scared of and drawn to the power of these tornadoes so intensely that she can’t help but become giddy at each new development. Anthony Ramos, as Javy, is the other standout performer. While Powell becomes the stereotypical hero, a sensitive soul hidden behind a mask of confidence, saving puppies and communities at a moment’s notice, Ramos has a much more nuanced and morally ambiguous character.

The actors do their best with some occasionally clunky dialogue and often underwhelming CGI, which is a disappointment coming from a sequel to such a groundbreaking visual achievement in ‘Twister’. Most of the characters are shallow, one dimensional fodder for tornado excitement. In that regard, it’s an interesting follow-up film for director Lee Isaac Chung, coming after his Oscar nominated work on the quietly beautiful ‘Minari’. He embraces blockbuster filmmaking and proves adept at making the ridiculous believable.

But hey, we don’t come to see a movie called ‘Twisters’ for complex character relationships and poignant dialogue. ‘Twisters’ delivers as a big, dumb spectacle, one-upping the disasters from the original in every way imaginable. Twin tornadoes! Fire tornadoes! Each tornado seems sentient, like the killer in a slasher film, stalking our heroes and attacking when they least expect it. It’s goofy and ridiculous, of course, but oh so fun.

Twisters
Rated PG-13 for intense action and peril, some language and injury images.
Running Time: 2 hours and 2 minutes

Director Lee Isaac Chung
Writers Mark L. Smith
Stars Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Brandon Perea, Maura Tierney, Sasha Lane
Rating PG-13
Running Time 122 Minutes
Genres Disaster, Action, Adventure, Thriller