It was almost exactly one year ago to the day that I am writing these words that moviegoers were hit with the one-two cinematic punch of Barbie and Oppenheimer, a pair of films that proved that one could make a large-scale studio project that was ambitious, unique and challenging while still being entertaining and accessible enough to rake in zillions of dollars at the box office as well. The two did so well, both financially and artistically, that for one brief and shining moment, it may have led moviegoers to idly dream that a new cinematic dawn was coming in which filmmakers and studios might be more willing to take a chance on more offbeat material rather than continue along the path of sequels, reboots and IP exploitation that had otherwise been dominating American filmmaking in recent years. Now comes Twisters, a film that seems to have been designed in some kind of anti-art laboratory to serve as a rebuke to everything that the Barbenheimer phenomenon served to represent—a tired, lazy and deeply inane piece of product that is yet another film that is convinced that if it bludgeons audiences with enough noise and visual sludge that they won’t notice just how lazy and uninspired the rest of it is.
The film is, of course, the long-gestating, if largely unrelated, sequel to the 1996 megahit Twister and before we go any further, let me assure that, contrary to the suggestions of many current observers trying to make the case that the original was some kind of beloved cultural touchstone of its era, that particular movie was always little more than pea-brained junk, a relic of that brief window in cinema history when CGI effects were solidifying their eventual stranglehold on the film industry and Jami Gertz could still get third billing on the poster and which rode the wave of popularity connected to producer Steven Spielberg, co-writer Michael Crichton and director Jan de Bont, the latter coming right off of his spectacular directorial debut Speed. And yet, as bottomlessly idiotic as that film was, it still contained a couple of reasonably worthwhile elements amidst the nonsense—a group of strong actors (ranging from leads Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton to such relative unknowns as Philip Seymour Hoffman and Todd Field) who managed to be compelling despite being stuck with paper-thin characters and dialogue that was little more than variations on the phrase “Look Out!,” a couple of reasonably well-staged action beats and, of course, that undeniably memorable image of a flying cow. Unfortunately, Twisters cannot manage to muster the ability to meet even this fairly low bar by comparison.
This time around, the film starts with a prologue in which brilliant student/storm chaser Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her crew are in the part of Oklahoma dubbed Tornado Alley to perform a grand experiment devised by her in which they will launch barrels of super-absorbent polymers up into a tornado in the hopes that they will break it down entirely. Alas, things go badly, the tornado proves to be stronger than expected and three members of her team, including her boyfriend, end up getting killed. When the story picks up five years later, she has left her former life behind entirely and gone to New York to work as a weather analyst when Javi (Anthony Ramos), the only other survivor of her failed experiment, comes to visit her with a proposition. He is working with a corporation that has developed radar technology that could potentially allow for 3D mapping of a tornado in progress that could theoretically help provide valuable information for their study and he wants to use Kate’s expertise at finding tornados before they happen to help implement them.
She eventually agrees to return to Oklahoma for a week to help him and his colleagues scout out storms—a week of almost unprecedented tornado activity, naturally. This naturally brings out a number of storm chasers who cheerfully hurl themselves into the path of danger in order to get some hair-raising videos for their YouTube channels. The big guy in this crowd is Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a self-professed “tornado wrangler” who not only goes into the storms leading his rag-tag group of cohorts in his tricked-out red truck, he shoots fireworks into the tornados for spectacular footage. Naturally, the more scientific-minded Kate thinks that Tyler is an egotistical blowhard more interested in selling T-shirts with his face plastered on them than in the science of tornados while he thinks that she is some “city girl” who doesn’t understand the simple ways of life. Wouldn’t you know it, as they go from storm to storm, each begins to discover that there is more to each other than meets the eye and that they might have more in common than they suspected.
Outside of the twin revelations that Tyler’s crew proves to be more altruistic than they initially appear (it turns out that they sell the shirts and junk in order to make money to help the people whose lives have been displaced by the storms) and that the group that Javi is working with is much less so, that is about it for plot or character development to be found in Mark L. Smith’s screenplay, Instead, the script is more concerned with following the basic template set by the original film, (right down to the extended sequence at a low point where some characters go home to visit relatives), tossing out callbacks, such as a reference to the machine that was the center of the first film to a sequence in a movie theatre showing The Bride of Frankenstein meant to evoke that one’s sequence in a drive-in screening The Shining (in both cases, perversely showing clips from movies that you’ll wish you were actually watching instead of the nonsense at hand) and supplying the barest minimum of narrative momentum required to get us from one storm sequence to the next.
Yes, I realize that one doesn’t primarily go to a film like this for anything other than the wanton destruction but even recognizing that, Twisters is still shockingly weak in all the non-storm-related material. The storyline is exceptionally dumb, the characters are startlingly one-dimensional, the country music soundtrack includes one song after another featuring hilariously on-the-nose lyrics and while I was not expecting to see an Al Gore-style lecture dropped into the middle of these proceedings, if all the talk about unprecedented weather included a single mention of the phrase “climate change,” it was so brief that I must have missed it. As for the leads, they fail to make much of an impact either—Powell is basically coasting on his undeniable charm without showing a glimmer of the talent and personality that made his work in Hit Man so engaging while Edgar-Jones delivers practically every line in a flat, unconvincing manner of the kind not seen on the big screen since Natalie Portman was wrestling with some of the lines she was handed in the Star Wars prequels.
Most of the failings could be forgiven, or at least temporarily overlooked, I suppose, if the big storm scenes that are its raison d’etre were spectacular enough but even here, Twisters somehow manages to stumble. Inexplicably, the directorial reins were given to Lee Isaac Chung, whose previous film, the endearing Oscar-winning semi-autobiographical drama Minari, could not be more removed from the thoroughly anonymous proceedings on display here if it tried. Actually, there is one scene in that earlier film, which centered on a Korean-American family relocating to Arkansas in the 1980s in order to farm and sell produce, that does involve a tornado watch and it proved to be one of the more gripping and meaningful sequences—not so much because of the special effects (the whole scene takes place inside a trailer) but because we care about the family and the barely-concealed tensions that are let loose by the oncoming storm. Throughout the film, he never displays any real confidence in his chops as an action filmmaker—at least de Bont knew how to build such sequences on a technical level—and as a result, most of the big set-pieces here lack any sort of visual cohesion with even the special effects coming across as lackluster in comparison to those in the first film despite three decades of technical advances.
To be fair, Twisters does begin to pick up a little steam during its big climax, in which our heroes try to rescue a small town in the path of an especially massive tornado, but it proves to be too little too late to make much of a difference. Here is a film that exists for no other reason than to exploit a familiar property in the laziest and most unchallenging manner in the hopes of scoring a big haul at the multiplex from viewers who want to see something “new,” but not too new before disappearing from the cultural mindset quicker than you can say Independence Day: Resurgence. Sadly, that is the one goal that it does manage to achieve in the end.