No one was exactly clamouring for it but Twisters, the imaginatively titled sequel to Twister, turned out alright in the end anyway. The original, complete with flying cow, came out in 1996, 24 years ago. At that point Lee Isaac Chung, director of this sequel, was a fresh faced 18 years old, star Glen Powell was eight and co-star Daisy Edgar-Jones was minus two.
To the film’s credit it leaves Twister where it was, not referring back to it at all. There are no cameos to remind us when Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton were the plucky duo chasing tornadoes around the mid-West, trying to heal a broken relationship as they dodged airborne cattle.
Here there’s no relationship to heal, or not one between the two stars at any rate. In a preamble we see young, smart tornado-chaser Kate (Edgar-Jones) being dealt the terrible blow she’ll spend the rest of the movie attempting to recover from.
In “it’s happening again” plotting, after a five-year hiatus, Kate is dragged back into tornado-chasing by old crewmate Javi (Anthony Ramos). That’s when they first encounter Glen Powell’s Tyler. He’s a different type of chaser, a whooping, hollering redneck who’s in “tornado wrangling” for personal gain, glory and social media clicks, whereas Kate’s more your science nerd nobly advancing the frontiers of knowledge.
Or those are the initial impressions anyway. In fact the movie spends much of its time interrogating those notions – ivory tower v boots on the ground, elites v working joes, city slickers v rural hayseeds and, let’s say it, Democrats v Republicans.
It comes to the conclusion, perhaps a bit wanly, that first impressions are not the full story. Also that maybe we’d all get along a bit better if we cut each other some slack now and again.
Powell, made from about 85% Tom Cruise DNA, plays the grinning Tyler like a courtly knight in reversed baseball cap, check shirt and jeans. Edgar-Jones is the fair maiden in shimmering samite (white tops, for the most part). For all the science blah, Kate’s tornado-chaser secret sauce is instinct (the preserve of maidens) and she’s also perfectly capable of slaying dragons on her own, thanks very much, at least for the majority of the time. It’s nice to have a Tyler on standby.
Two side characters exist just to do the necessary: Scott (David Corenswet), one of Javi’s crew, to throw misogynistic shade at Kate. And Ben (Harry Hadden-Paton), a British journalist embedded with Tyler’s crew to write a story on tornado chasers, who’s the useful idiot filling us in on background detail.
None really needs filling in. The plot, the characters and the situations are all nothing novel but that doesn’t matter all that much. For all the drones and computer modelling, talk of tornado-killing polyacrylate, caps and shears, we’re here to watch not learn. Benjamin Wallfisch’s soundtrack blends steroidal hoedown, staccato horns and Lynyrd Skynyrd knock-off to keep everything bouncing along with the whirlwind, while Chung and co give us good carnage and disaster on a massive scale as one tornado after another rips through the countryside, upending everything in its path and, when it hits a town, splintering it like it was matchsticks.
Hollywood has been doing good tornadoes since at least as far back as The Wizard of Oz and this latest reckoning with deadly weather is brutally, convincingly realised on the screen. No argument there.
The relationship between Kate and Tyler though. Call it chemistry or call it Tyler’s character initially painted so negatively there isn’t time to redefine him, but as the two leads edge towards each other romantically, or suggest they might, lights flash, sirens wail and anchors are dropped. The film comes to a halt, and doesn’t start up again until more twisters comes spinning over the horizon.
Twisters – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
