Review: Twisters
Score: 1.5/4
Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters is like the title storm, in that it both blows and sucks. This is a case where an effective marketing campaign, a leading actor on the rise and a lack of familiarity with the 1996, Jan de Bont-directed original are enough to buy this a hit opening weekend. However, once the clouds have parted, this will reveal itself to be one of the bigger letdowns of the season.
Daisy Edgar-Jones stars as Kate, a brilliant scientist who has walked away from her study of tornados after a tragedy took out most of her team while pursuing a twister. Despite the assumed PTSD and years of nightmares that followed, Kate is easily talked into returning to storm chasing. Once she’s back driving into storms for the sake of scientific progress, she meets Tyler (played by Glen Powell), a daredevil internet star whose competing tornado chaser team is only speeding into massive storms for thrills and online clicks.
Powell is having a big moment, having stood out in Top Gun: Maverick (2023), leading a surprise hit with Anyone But You (also 2023) and starring in the acclaimed Netflix pickup, Richard Linklater’s Hit Man (2024). If you’re one of Powell’s new fans, his performance in Hit Man, which is one of the best of 2024, is a must, while this is easily the least of his recent work. Powell does a halfway decent McConaughey impression but his character here isn’t much. Edgar-Jones barely registered in Where the Crawdads Sing (2022) and, unfortunately, her blank turn here is more of the same. It’s a stretch to say that Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt had red hot chemistry in the original Twister, but they were downright volcanic compared to what we have here.
What does Twisters have to do with the 1996 blockbuster original? Weirdly, nothing at all. The obvious choice, to make Kate the daughter of the characters played by Hunt and Paxton, is avoided. Then, why is it titled Twisters? It’s about marketing and that’s it.
Yes, the CGI tornados are impressive, but Chung doesn’t know how to direct an action movie. Whereas de Bont kept the camera still and allowed us to marvel at the vast vortex of swirling air that swallows the earth, no shot is ever held long enough for us to get a good look at anything. Also, just because the film is set in tornado country, does the color palette and lighting scheme have to make this look like it was shot in Seattle?
The part of de Bont’s film that never worked was the who-cares subplot about the rival tornado chasers, led by a weirdly underutilized Cary Elwes; that part of the film goes nowhere and only distracts from the thrill of emerging into the danger ahead. Here, the car chases into the bad weather are neither here nor there and the same goes for the list of supporting team members. There’s a weird bit where the two leads drive into a storm together and, rather than the soundtrack underscore the danger they’re in, its even more honky-tonk country Western music. Are we not supposed to be afraid of the storms if they’re set to Travis Tritt?
The climax demonstrates some hutzpah for being set in a movie theater: the filmmakers are clearly mimicking the novelty of the drive-in movie theater scene from Twister, in which a screen showing The Shining eerily folds up and flies away. Here, the small, old-fashioned theater in an Oklahoma town is showing Frankenstein (1931). Why? It’s not Halloween. Either way, the intended meta-threat (wow, I’m watching a movie theater get attacked, while I’m in a movie theater!) never comes across, though it’s the only memorable set piece here.
The scenes of widescale destruction and the sad aftermath of the tornados is too serious and important for a movie this stupid. These scenes are, perhaps, a necessary way of stating this isn’t a Michael Bay-like carnival ride of mayhem but once we’re given cursory glances of loss, its quickly off to the next scene of jocular jerks driving into danger for the sake of online popularity.
What does this leave us to walk away with? Aside from a peppy end credit sequence (hardly a compliment), there is the now iconic moment where Powell struts around in a wet t-shirt, a scene tame enough to air on Disney+. Otherwise, there’s little here to latch onto.
Despite the pedigree of Steven Spielberg and Michael Crichton as the creators/producers of Twister, it was dumb and dull whenever it isn’t on its feet running, though that happens rarely. The original has the shot of the flying cow, a truck driving through a house that has been dropped on a road and, best of all, makes the audience afraid of the storms. Like how Backdraft (1991) makes fire not only a threat but a character with mythic qualities, Twister made the similarly silly but effective decision to frame the natural disasters as living, breathing and ruthless embodiments of chaos. Twister treated the tornados as though they were an unholy extension of life’s unfairness, whereas Twisters is the scientific, atheist counterpart, piling on the pseudo-science above all else. Whereas Twister is an odd love story about finding trust within the wreckage, Twisters is the bland xerox copy.
