Director Lee Issac Chung leans on his two very capable leads for a charming slow-burn courtship amid a disaster film that serves as a breezy watch for mainstream audiences. The film is a noble effort to relaunch a nearly 30 year old I.P. and it succeeds many ways, particularly in adding more nuance to the disaster genre than often seen.
Warner Bros and Universal again partner for this Twisters franchise entry, each splitting the domestic and international distribution rights.
At the heart of the 1996 film were the late Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, who were all but divorced until the storm chasing rekindled their shared passion and soulful connection. In Twisters, Glen Powell’s Tyler Owens and Daisy Edgar Jones’ Kate Carter are not rekindling any sort of long lost love. Their relationship starts midway through the first act and blossoms with an engaging, antagonistic energy that audiences will revel watching on the big screen.
Kate is an aspiring scientist from Oklahoma who has long experienced the tornado way of life and its unpredictability. She’s fascinated by the violent twisters and works on a theoretical means to disband a tornado. The opening sequence, like in the original film, is a tragedy which haunts our protagonist fro the remainder of the film.
A tornado chase operation led by Kate fails to test her hypotheses of adding chemicals to an active tornado in order to stop the funnel cloud. Even worse, it claimed the lives of her closest friends… only Anthony Ramos’ Javi survives and it’s clear her days of storm chasing are behind her.
Many years later, Kate is at a comfy desk job working for national weather in NYC. A surprise visit from Javi and an appeal to her desire to help the folks of Oklahoma and “Tornado Alley” lead her to get back in the game. Javi is now an entrepreneur financed by a morally dubious real estate investor. Javi’s new company has state of the art equipment for scanning a tornado from three sides, and his partner on the project is future Superman actor David Corenswet.
Kate finds that storm chasing is not what it used to be, with many amatuers and youtube stars joining in on the hunt. The biggest star for the youtube crowd is Powell’s Tyler. His team is made up of many colorful characters played by Katy O’Brian, Sasha Lane, Brandon Perea, and Tunde Adebi. They’re dragging around a journalist from the UK (Harry Hadden Paton) to experience Tyler’s particular brand of Tornado wrangling.
Kate is thrown by the brashness of Tyler and his group, but there’s an immediate sense of opposites attract as she tries to put him on the wrong direction. Kate seems to have a sensing ability to follow the right storm and she remains effective at it for the remainder of the film.
Kate slowly realizes through the various tragedies that Tyler’s team is actually the good guys and that all their “Shameless merchandise” sales go toward raising money for Tornado victims while Javi’s benefactor seeks to swallow up land from the victims by offering them low money for their decimated land. Without proper insurance, they have limited options and this vulture is all too keen to take advantage of them.
Once Kate realizes the truth, she warm to Tyler even more and we enjoy the rodeo sequence which turns into a Tornado evacation and they are left to hunker down in an empty pool beside a motel. This night sequence and the random bystanders that are forced to come together proved to be the most exhilarating sequence in the film. While a “fire tornado” and it attacking a movie theater was chosen for the finale, this sequence here had more intensity, more at stake, and it was beautifully choreographed.
The best moments of the film are when Tyler joins Kate and her mother Cathy (played perfectly by Maura Tierney) at her childhood home. Tyler sees the immense research done by Kate in the hopes of suppressing a tornado using various combinations of chemicals.
The budding romantic duo revive her experiment and they release the beads into a passing tornado, but it fails to dismantle mother nature’s whirlwind. Luckily Javi shows up at Kate’s childhood home to apologize to her, and that conversation leads to the eureka moment of adding silver iodide to the experiment.
Both team teams track the finale tornado near El Reno where the aforementioned fire tornado is created after hitting an oil refinery. As Kate and the Wranglers head into town to try to save more townspeople, Javi breaks away from his employer’s directive and joins them. It’s an obvious turn for the character, but works nicely as Javi does it because it’s the right thing to do… not out of some misplaced romantic desire to save Kate.
In fact, Kate leaves a wounded Tyler and Javi to take his truck and release her tornado experiment at the heart of this giant tornado. Right as the movie theater’s roof is pulled off and her friends face certain death, she succeeds in stopping the tornado.
The film ends with an airport scene where Tyler and Kate continue to let their chemistry sizzle, but there is no culminating kiss (which has been widely discussed as a Spielberg note).
The film succeeds with good direction and actors that have chemistry amid an average screenplay that checks the necessary boxes. It’s an interesting choice not to bring back any of the 1996 film’s characters for this entry, perhaps Helen Hunt is holding out for the inevitable sequel.
Letter Grade: B