“Twisters” does its job well enough. It’s a tornado parade with a few ethical dilemmas and, as an avian nod to the flying bovines of the 1996 hit “Twister,” it gives a cameo role to a wind-borne chicken, safely deposited on the hood of a truck after getting swept up by an Oklahoma vortex.
In the ’96 film Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton and Jami Gertz did their level best to enliven a romantic triangle in the middle of a peppy disaster movie, nominally about “His Girl Friday”-inspired exes and workaholics in love with a tornado, any tornado, waiting for the citified Gertz character to realize she loves her fiancée enough to set him free.
Director Jan de Bont’s movie took care of Job One, which had little to do with whatever words the actors were yelling. “Twister” came out at a time when recent breakthroughs in digital visual effects meant you could usually make money putting something on the screen that hadn’t been visually realized quite that way before. If it wasn’t a liquid terminator (“Terminator 2”), it was a revolutionarily persuasive T. rex (“Jurassic Park”). Or tornadoes (“Twister”). Or super-enormous waves (“The Perfect Storm,” a 2000 hit).
It’s harder now to wow audiences with that stuff. Still, the new “Twisters” manages a pretty fair mixture of digital and practical high-wind trickery. Daisy Edgar-Jones, so good in the excellent 2020 series (now on Hulu) “Normal People,” plays Kate, a brilliant young scholar who takes a fatal risk in the movie’s prologue, pushing her frisky colleagues, including the equally driven Javi (Anthony Ramos), too close to the action in pursuit of knowledge, data collection and grant funding. Five years later she’s safely behind a desk in New York City, working as a meteorologist who’s the smartest one in any given room but a shell of her former adventurous spirit.
Once Javi drops back into her life, reluctantly she joins him on a tornado chase back in Oklahoma, near where Kate’s hardy, flinty mother (Maura Tierney) lives her life, wondering why her daughter doesn’t visit more often. Kate’s initial research into tornadoes led her to build a model to find a way to suck the moisture out of a deadly twister, thereby collapsing it and preventing rampant destruction. Javi’s part of a somewhat fishy group funded by a predatory real estate maven, cashing in on tornado-stricken property owners’ desperate straits.
We have to endure a fair amount of techno-explain-o in “Twisters,” which escalates quickly once the rival chasers led by YouTube sensation Tyler, played by Glen Powell, horn in on the action. Tyler spies Kate and his heart turns into a little funnel cloud of desire. Despite their initial Bickersons act it’s clear these two share a thirst for knowledge and a respect for nature’s surly side.
While Tyler and Javi compete in an exceedingly chaste way for Kate’s affections, “Twisters,” directed by Lee Isaac Chung, sticks to a dutiful tornado/destruction/aftermath/repeat cycle. This is Chung’s fifth feature; his previous one, “Minari,” came straight out of his own rural Arkansas upbringing and memories. Filming on location in Oklahoma (as did the earlier “Twister”) he brings a real eye for unfussy but striking landscapes, small-town streets and rodeos, and his actors’ faces in close-up.
Less effective, I think, was the decision by Chung and cinematographer Dan Mindel to shoot much of “Twisters” in extreme telephoto imagery, which crowds the frame (on purpose) but tends to render everything as a blur of skidding tires and flying debris. Chung is not yet a first-rate director of action, digital or otherwise. It may be more of a script deficiency, but “Twisters” careens from scene to scene, rarely making the most of any of its human elements, sidelining talents such as Katy O’Brian, for example (of the recent “Love Lies Bleeding”), which is a drag. Hotshot Tyler, meant to be equal parts obnoxious and savior, goes from one character guise to the other without a convincing transition.
Edgar-Jones has lots of screen time, which is not the same as having much of interest to do with that time. She does, however, bust out a wide-eyed look of awe as Kate peers above her vehicle, straight into the latest weather event. This is “Twisters” in a nutshell. Movies like this require a little acting and a lot of mute, carefully calibrated reacting.
But would it kill a tornado movie to do better in between tornadoes? The dialogue sounds vaguely AI-generated and Grammarly-revised. Tyler nicknames Kate “city girl” and repeats the phrase enough to make you wish him digital harm, on the double. The biggest distinction between the first “Twister” and the new “Twisters” is one of conscience: This time, Kate, Javi and Tyler wrestle to varying degrees with how much of their time should be spent on their own pursuits versus helping tornado victims clean up after the latest round of misery.
At the same time, the movie doesn’t touch anything controversial: No mention of climate change factors, no politics, no sociological divides, no nuthin’ except for What We Came For: wind, flames (refineries in flames, especially), flying wind turbine blades and wind, which I mentioned already but there’s just so much of it. At one point Kate reminds Javi that his financial backer is “profiting off the people’s tragedy.” Every disaster-based spectacle in screen history knows that tune.
“Twisters” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: PG-13 (for intense action and peril, some language and injury images)
Running time: 1:57
How to watch: Premieres in theaters July 18
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
