'Twisters' is 'pretty good' for what it is | WBUR News
After recently being reminded that life has an expiration date, I decided to stop going to see sequels to movies I didn’t like in the first place. You’d be surprised how much time this frees up, not to mention the psychic benefits of releasing oneself from the obligation of having to opine on another “Bad Boys” or “A Quiet Place” picture, or whatever the latest Pixar sequel is about mismatched characters learning to overcome their initial dislike for each other during Rude Goldberg-inspired chase sequences. But it felt like an exception should be made for “Twisters,” a decades-late continuation of Jan de Bont’s idiotic 1996 blockbuster in which an angsty Helen Hunt runs around in a tank top trying to get revenge on the tornado that killed her father.
It has been brought to my attention that a lot of people have a sentimental attachment to “Twister,” presumably because they first saw it when they were very young. Alas, I was 21 when the movie came out and thus old enough to be appalled by dialogue that sucked harder than an actual tornado. Everybody’s terrible in “Twister.” Especially a young performer named Philip Seymour Hoffman, so grating and obnoxious that a year later, when he showed up in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Hard Eight” I actually said to myself, “Oh no, not the guy from ‘Twister,’” which in retrospect is a hilarious thing to have said about the greatest actor of his generation.
So why bother watching a sequel made 28 years later by a Hollywood obviously out of ideas? Well, in one of the stranger production developments in recent memory, “Twisters” was directed by Lee Isaac Chung, whose previous film, the gentle, hugely moving immigrant drama “Minari,” won the top prize at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival before going on to score six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. When I first heard he was directing “Twisters,” I thought it was a joke. Sadly, this is the best a broken industry has to offer its up-and-coming talent — strip-mining old intellectual properties owned by studios looking to cash in on pre-sold nostalgia points. Winning Sundance and being nominated for Academy Awards used to secure opportunities for young directors to helm their dream projects. Now they get a chance to make sequels to stuff you might sort of remember fondly.
One can mourn the circumstances that have led to the existence of “Twisters” while also acknowledging that the film itself is — for what it is — actually pretty good. Certainly an improvement on the original and a fun Friday night at the movies, “Twisters” stars Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kate Carter, a meteorology-obsessed grad student whose storm chasing crew is wiped out by an especially nasty cyclone in the film’s chillingly effective opening sequence. Five years later, she returns to Oklahoma at the behest of the only other surviving member of her team (a charmless Anthony Ramos) whose new research project comes with some shady strings attached.
The clever, 21st-century spin in “Twisters” is that these days legit scientists have to compete with yahoo YouTubers chasing storms for likes and LOLs. The most amusing of these is internet superstar Tyler Owens, played by the absurdly charismatic Glen Powell, who was seemingly born to swagger in a Stetson. Tyler likes to drive his tricked-out pickup truck straight into storms and shoot fireworks up the funnel cloud, making him the coolest movie character I’ve seen in some time. And in case there were any doubts about director Chung’s indie cred, Tyler’s road crew includes “American Honey” star Sasha Lane, former TV on the Radio frontman Tunde Adebimpe and “Love Lies Bleeding” bodybuilder Katy O’Brian. They’re a fun bunch of adrenaline junkie do-gooders, selling cheesy merch to support local disaster relief efforts.
We’re told the film takes place during “an unprecedented outbreak” of tornadoes, though the words “climate change” are never uttered aloud, presumably to avoid upsetting any oil executives or MAGA uncles in the audience. Maybe this is a good thing, since the movie’s scientific bona fides are sketchy at best, particularly when it comes to Kate’s plan to fill the center of tornados with extra-absorbent polymers used to make diapers, thereby sucking out the moisture and deflating the storms. It’s here one most keenly feels the “story by” writing credit for “Top Gun: Maverick” director Joseph Kosinski, turning a movie about people running away from tornadoes into a story about people using radar gizmos and truck-mounted rockets to try and implode them. It’s kind of an awesome idea and just the right amount of stupid for a movie like this.
There’s a teasing spark between Powell and Edgar-Jones, the two characters sizing each other up and instantly clocking that there’s more to each of them than meets the eye. (I don’t recall seeing Edgar-Jones in anything before, but a nice thing about not watching much television is that there’s apparently a bumper crop of cute British starlets showing up to surprise you in Hollywood movies.) Kate and Tyler needle one another entertainingly, though the relationship remains disappointingly professional. On the way out of my screening, I overheard a young person say they were so happy that the couple didn’t kiss. That struck me as a weird takeaway from a movie that’s basically begging to end with a great big smooch.
Powell finally seems to be having the breakout moment we’ve been waiting for since he stole Richard Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!!” back in 2016. He’s got that elusive X factor thing where he can command the screen while remaining completely relaxed. There’s a reason Tom Cruise cast him as a smirking mirror of his younger self in the aforementioned “Maverick,” but anyone who saw Powell as astronaut John Glenn in 2016’s terrific “Hidden Figures” knows he’s also capable of a forthright, uncomplicated decency that’s increasingly difficult for young actors in our post-ironic age. One of the only performers his age who can convincingly pull off wearing an oversized belt buckle, he also sells us on the film’s shocking revelation that Tyler went to college.
From left: Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell in "Twisters." (Courtesy Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Pictures and Amblin Entertainment)As demonstrated in “Minari,” Chung has a real feel for heartland Americana. Having grown up in Oklahoma’s tornado alley, a lot of those locations were probably second nature for him. It’s interesting how you can watch the movie’s rodeo scene and it feels like people of all different stripes actually live and work there, as opposed to the pandering, beer commercial aesthetics one usually sees in Hollywood movies about what studio executives call “flyover country.”
“Twisters” also doesn’t do the annoying modern sequel thing of constantly elbowing the audience in the ribs with references to the original. I suppose Edgar-Jones’ tank tops are a subtle callback to the first film, but I was fully expecting them to stop at Helen Hunt’s house with a sad version of a Van Halen song playing while everybody looks wistfully at a framed production photo of Bill Paxton. It’s refreshing that you don’t need to have seen “Twister” to enjoy this movie. (In fact, your life might be considerably better if you never watch it at all.)
Chung’s action scenes are adequate, if maybe not quite spectacular enough for a film of this size. The exception is a fantastic, semiotically loaded final set-piece during which folks taking refuge in a movie theater are sucked out through a massive hole in the building where the screen used to be. It’s a wryly self-reflexive comment on an entertainment that’s just good enough to leave you wishing that all these talented people had been hired to make something more than a sequel to “Twister.”
“Twisters” is now in theaters.
Film/TV
