‘Twisters’ boasts a movie star performance from Glen Powell, but the action disappoints
The sequel to the blockbuster from three decades ago nails the human element, but the storms are less than impressive.
The 1996 action film Twister was one of the biggest hits of the 1990s. Most blockbuster action movies of that period were about disasters or bad guys stealing bombs and threatening good guys with them, and Twister was the former.
Directed by Jan de Bont (in his follow-up to Speed) and co-written by novelist Michael Crichton, Twister was unusual in that it never got a sequel, even though it seemed tailor-made for one. Aside from the winning lead turns from Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt — and the part with the cow — I never cared for the film.
But now, it finally does get that sequel, nearly 30 years later, with Twisters, which is more of a spiritual sequel than a direct one. It features not a single person in common in either the cast or the topline crew, nor any acknowledgment, not even in a winking way, of any of the original film's events. It does make clear that storm-following technology has changed since the ‘90s and that everyone now has a weather app on their phone.
The film features a big-time movie star performance from Glen Powell, who is currently the star of the moment, and pretty decent chemistry between him and the female lead, Daisy Edgar-Jones, who inherits Hunt’s old role as the female lead who has something terrible happen at the beginning and spends most of the movie in tank tops that get progressively dirtier.
But I wasn’t particularly impressed with the film’s action, and it never does an especially good job of explaining the science or physicality of what we’re watching. The human parts of the film are fine, but the storms are much less so.
Even worse than that, it’s not as fun as a summer blockbuster should be.
Twisters is directed by Lee Isaac Chung, who directed the acclaimed indie movie Minari back in 2020 and has followed it up with a big-budget action movie. Joseph Kosinski, the director of Top Gun Maverick, has a “story by” credit; that movie, in particular, did a much better job explaining and depicting the action than this one.
Aside from one scene set at a rodeo and another in a movie theater, there’s not much that’s especially impressive or memorable.
As Twisters begins, Kate (Edgar-Jones) is a fledgling meteorologist in Oklahoma. She is part of a team (also including Daryl McCormack and Kiernan Shipka) trying to find a way to dissipate the effect of tornados. When this mission ends in tragedy, a traumatized Kate has decamped to New York, where she’s taken a desk job with the National Weather Service.
Visited by Javier (Anthony Ramos), the only other survivor of the tragedy, Kate heads back home to deal with a particularly horrific tornado season. This brings her into contact with a new breed of storm chasers, led by cowboy-hatted good ol’ boy Tyler Owens (Powell), who chases the storms, fires rockets into them, and puts it all on his YouTube channel.
We’re first supposed to see Javier as a benevolent do-gooder and Tyler as a crass and cocky jerk, but soon we realize that Javier is working for some shady financial interests, while Tyler, beneath the cowboy veneer, turns out to have a good heart, as well as an unlikely scientific background.
Yes, there’s a love triangle plot, although the movie, to its clear detriment, keeps that on the back burner until the very end. Have they not been following Powell’s career, and how much do audiences love watching him romance women?
Aside from the past trauma, Kate’s main character trait is that everyone thinks she’s a city slicker, even though she’s an Oklahoma native. There’s even one scene at a rodeo where she literally says, “This isn’t my first rodeo.” Another new movie, National Anthem, is about a young man’s queer coming of age, in part on the rodeo circuit, and even that film thought it would be too obvious to include a line like that.
Meanwhile, Twisters has an above-average supporting cast, with stars from various quality indie movies of recent years everywhere you look.
Ramos starred in In the Heights, while Brandon Perea was in Nope. Here’s Sasha Lane from American Honey, Katy O’Brian from Love Lies Bleeding, and Tunde Adebimpe from Rachel Getting Married. Even David Corenswet, due to soon play Superman, is in the film as the fourth banana on the storm chasing team.
Maura Tierney, who was so wonderful in The Iron Claw last year, plays Kate’s mother. Much less successful is Harry Hadden-Paton, in a failed comic relief turn as a British journalist who tags along with the storm chasers, acts scared, and vomits a lot.
(I will admit here that I often confuse Daisy Edgar-Jones with the other English actresses of her generation with that surname, like Emilia Jones and Felicity Jones; the existence of an Amazon show called Daisy Jones and the Six—starring none of those Joneses—doesn’t help matters. Daisy Edgar-Jones is the one who was on Normal People and the movie Where the Crawdads Sing.)
I was with Twisters as long as it stuck with the humans. The storms? A bit less impressive.