What does a disaster movie need? Characters to root for, terrifying spectacle, and for the audience to feel tension up to our eyeballs. Twisters delivers on some of the above, but it’s not nearly as good as the original film, and no, that’s not nostalgia talking.
Twisters opens with Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her friends Javi (Anthony Ramos), Jeb (Daryl McCormack), Addy (Kiernan Shipka) and Praveen (Nik Dodani) testing out her prototype to slow down and stop a tornado. She’s hoping it’s effective enough to get her the grant money she’s been working towards, but as expected, things go cripplingly wrong. This first 15 minutes of the film is excellent and delivers on the shock and awe. We cut to 5 years later, with Kate now living and working in New York, and staying far away from tornados.
Javi’s started a new company called Storm Par that does 3D imaging of tornados, and drops in on Kate to convince her to come work for him. He appeals to the part of Kate that used to love chasing tornados, and even though she looked thoroughly unconvinced by his pitch – for some reason he uses a spoon to create a mini twister in a cup of water that lasts like 3 seconds – she agrees to tag along for a week. When she arrives in Oklahoma, she meets a group of tornado wranglers and their leader Tyler Owens (Glen Powell). Their motto: if you feel it, chase it. Tyler comes across as this reckless, showboaty, arrogant son of a gun, but of course we’re made privy to his various layers as the movie wears on.
Twisters succeeds as much as it does because of Powell’s charms. He is a bonafide movie star, and I know this because people were actually cheering in the cinema when he appeared on screen. As Tyler, he’s cocky, funny, and immensely charismatic. I completely buy him as a YouTuber with a million followers, and someone who would put his own face on a t-shirt. Powell and Edgar-Jones have decent chemistry, but for some reason the movie seems keen to not properly explore the sparks.
Their romantic antagonism is not set up well – she hates him at first sight, though it’s hard to know why. Is it his foolhardy confidence? He likes her immediately, and once again, we’re not quite sure why. Kate is basically Twilight’s Isabella Swan in this movie, where all she has to do is exist and that’s enough to have all these men falling at her feet. There’s kind of a love triangle going on with Javi and Tyler, but like I said, the movie doesn’t commit to any of this, so the romantic plotlines end up feeling vaguely undefined. If you’re not going to give us any payoff on the romantic tension, then why even tease us with it in the first place? That’s just plain mean.
As for the tornados, this movie has way too many. I know the title is Twisters, but having too many tornadoes in the span of one movie does impact the tension. Instead of the action ramping up constantly, there’s actual lulls after each tornado episode, and I found myself bored at some of the tornado visuals. At times, the movie seems to be heading somewhere good, like when a tornado spins into a factory which sets everything ablaze, only for the movie to cut away from this visual in the next moment. This is a disaster movie, let us have the spectacle.
The soundscape is also a letdown, with way too many country songs and not enough that contributes to the tension. At times the country songs do work, other times they just feel out of place. There are many moments where I’m truly entertained by the film, like when Maura Tierney shows up, or when Tyler melancholically struts in the rain with a white t-shirt and white cowboy hat. It knows how to be a blockbuster, which is why it’s strange when at the end, it doesn’t give the audience what they truly want.
READ NEXT: Bad PS2 Games That Were Good the Whole Time, Actually
Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site.
