Twisters feels like the accretion of several alarming trends: the acceleration of the climate emergency; the rapidity with which indie auteurs get sucked up into franchise world (Minari writer-director Lee Isaac Chung, in this instance); and the coronation of Glen Powell.
Okay, that last one isn’t so bad. Powell has a more cocksure vibe than his fellow Texan Bill Paxton (God rest his beautiful soul), who was second-billed to Helen Hunt in 1996’s Twister the way Powell is second-billed in Twisters to Daisy Edgar-Jones. Headlining his third film in seven months, Powell looks almost as dreamily Kenlike as Ryan Gosling, though he’s nowhere near as funny. Still it’s tough not to like the guy, even if he’s playing (checks notes) a former professional bull rider who actually has an advanced degree in meteorology, a fact he keeps under his 10-gallon hat so as not to damage his brand as a shit-kickin’ influencer. “He’s a hillbilly with a YouTube channel,” as someone puts it in this pretty good bad-weather movie.
Let me walk that back: By “pretty good,” I mean, “not a chore to sit through” and “I didn’t feel depressed watching it, the way I did 15 minutes into Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.”
That’s probably because Twisters spares us the latter’s reckoning with the cruel march of time by belonging to a different genus of legacyquel/remake/retread—the kind that simply repeats the prior movie’s events but with all new, somewhat different characters. The 2024 film’s screenplay is by The Revenant scribe Mark L. Smith, but Twister screenwriters Michael Crichton and Anne–Marie Martin get a contractual-but-still-hilarious “based on characters by” credit. Which characters? The tornadoes?
Well, maybe! One idea that Twisters carries on from its 28-year-old ancestor—and from the less fondly recalled Jaws: The Revenge—is that destructive natural phenomena select their targets with specificity and intention. “We’re having a once-in-a-generation tornado outbreak in Oklahoma,” Javi, third lead Anthony Ramos, tells Edgar-Jones’ Kate, attempting to recruit her for his tornado-imaging mission. “It’s going after the people we love.”
I have no idea what Powell’s character, a professional (?) storm-chaser with the highly cinematic name of Tyler Owens, aims to accomplish in Twisters, other than trying to get Kate to succumb to his gentle, low-presh seduction campaign. (An Arkansan, he calls her “City Girl” to get her daggum goat.) But I also have no idea why both he and Javi are so smitten with this lady, who’s just kind of a drag. The movie gets some comic mileage out of Tyler fashioning himself as “the Tornado Wrangler” and hawking merch with that slogan. Kate is more of a Tornado Whisperer, whose intuition for which way storms will swerve turns out to be more reliable than any of the high-tech gizmos Javi has brought along on their expedition. Which is not to say that the twisters in Twisters can’t still sneak up on our heroes like ninjas. They can! They do!
Like Hunt’s character in Twister, Kate is haunted by a tornado-involved fatality in her past. Unlike Hunt, Edgar-Jones cannot for one damn second convince us her life has been shaped by the fear of (subconscious desire for) a tornado to sweep her away, too.
Kate was working on a method of (checks notes again) “choking out” a tornado in college when she stopped because a tornado she tried to kill (notes) killed her friends instead. She’ll get another chance to show that tornado what’s what—I’m assuming it’s the same tornado, the one to which Crichton and Martin imparted such a rich and dimensional inner life all those years ago. But only after a lovely interlude with Maura Tierney, who’s not playing the same character Lois Smith played in Twister but serves the same function, and only after Kate and her confederates have spent a lot of time yelling at people who live in Oklahoma that they should hunker down in their basements when tornadoes happen. Thanks for the tip, City Girl.
Twisters also honors its precursor by filling out even its minor roles with fun-to-spot contenders: Twister gave us Philip Seymour Hoffman, Todd Field, and Alan Ruck. The new film’s back-benchers include Brandon Perea, so fun as the motormouthed Geek Squad technician in Nope two summers ago; Katy O’Brian, so memorable as the lovestruck, drug-addled bodybuilder in spring’s Love Lies Bleeding; and newly caped Man of Steel David Corenswet. Amusingly, this palpable Clark Kent-type plays a total shitheel here. Since Twisters is both set and was shot in Oklahoma, I have to point out that its paucity of Native American faces, even among the extras, is more than a little weird.
Again: No Chore to Sit Through. Twisters is both just barely a movie and more of a movie than Twister was, even as it reprises all its precursor’s block-rockin’ beats. Remember the scene where a drive-in playing The Shining got all Twisted up? True to its title, Twisters pluralizes that sequence, sitting its climax against a horror double feature at the real-life Centre Theatre in El Reno, Oklahoma, pop. 16,989. “This theater isn’t built to withstand what’s coming!” Javi yells, a joke that’s more solid than the foundation of that building. Despite all its talk about aggressive and untamable weather, no one in Twisters ever imperils its earning potential by uttering the phrase “climate change.” I get it. Who among us wouldn’t rather seek shelter in a grand old cinema while the world outside gets whipped and buffeted away?
If there’s a threequel, it’ll need an appellation that portends even more chaos and destruction than Twisters.
Twitter, anyone?
Twisters (PG-13, 122 minutes) is in area theaters today, July 19.