Twisters
Early in Lee Isaac Chung’s TWISTERS (2024, Peacock), cocky tornado wrangler Glen Powell and traumatized meteorologist Daisy Edgar-Jones race each other to get to the perfect storm as Benjamin Wallfisch’s score thunders forth with a Western theme that seems like something Elmer Bernstein or Jerome Moross might have written on steroids. It’s a harbinger of what’s to come — a derivative action film long on spectacle and short on originality. You know, or is that dread, that Powell will turn out to have a softer side and help Edgar-Jones get over the pain of having lost three colleagues to an EF5 she was tracking five years earlier and that whatever they’re trying to accomplish can only be achieved by falling in love and working together.
The film’s big effects are expertly achieved. It’s hard not to be moved by a mother feverishly clutching her little girl as they cling to the pipes in a swimming pool while trying to avoid getting sucked up into a tornado. And the sight of buildings being blown apart is impressive, even if you’re aware it’s mostly CGI. Edgar-Jones is a sensitive, intelligent actress, and once he gets past acting like a butt, Powell can be very charming. As a bonus, there are scenes with the wonderful Maura Tierney as Edgar-Jones’ mother, and she gets to smile and crack jokes, something that rarely happens in most of her TV roles. But other actors, like David Corenswet and Sasha Lane, are pretty much wasted. They take a back seat to the special effects and the plot contrivances.
Although Chung and writers Mark L. Smith and Joseph Kosinski get points for making Edgar-Jones, even at her most tortured, a strong leading lady more capable than most of the men around her, there’s also a creeping sense that this is a disaster film for the second Trump era. Powell’s self-taught team are consistently presented as just as competent as and more honorable than Edgar-Jones’ highly degreed colleagues, who are revealed to be working with a real-estate developer so he can cheaply buy up properties destroyed by the tornadoes. Since he’s barely seen, that makes the scientists (aside from Edgar-Jones, who doesn’t know about the dealings) the bad guys, which would play well with MAGAts. Then there’s the touching moment in which Powell tries to show Edgar-Jones the positive side of Oklahoma life by taking her to a rodeo, thereby extolling the fine American tradition of animal torture. And even though Tierney wonders about the increase in tornados along with other severe weather, there’s not a word about man-made climate change until almost two hours into the film, and that’s just a hint flashed under the closing credits, when most people would be leaving. Chung has said he cut earlier references from the script because he didn’t want the film to be too preachy. Did he not understand the plot?
Though this is billed as a sequel to the 1996 TWISTER, it’s nowhere near as much fun. As in the first film, there are some WIZARD OF OZ references, but there’s not the lovely grace note of having members of the team act like equivalents to Dorothy’s friends on the Yellow Brick Road. There’s no real playfulness, either. Instead of running gags and character quirks, you just get special effects blasting you in the face like an over-stimulated toddler who’s just learned how much fun it is to scream. Worse yet, there are no cows. I miss the cows.
