Jan de Bont’s Twister is a modern disaster movie classic but does the sequel, Twisters, live up to it?
PLOT: A former storm chaser (Daisy Edgar-Jones) recovering from a tragedy is convinced by a former colleague to help him chase a series of massive twisters rocking central Oklahoma.
REVIEW: Jump back to the summer of 1996. I was fourteen years old and going to see Twister at the old Famous Eight here in good old Montreal, an old suburban movie theatre that was showing a movie in THX for the first time ever. I’ll never forget sitting down with a friend to watch Jan de Bont’s classic and being rocked to the core by the amazing VFX and sound – and it remains a favourite of mine. It had a rock solid cast of characters, all of whom were memorable, plus two perfect regular Joe heroes in Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, with the movie, believe it or not, actually a disaster movie quasi remake of the classic screwball comedy His Girl Friday, with the genders reversed. It shouldn’t have worked as well as it did, but boy, oh boy, I loved watching it. The movie was a runaway smash hit, grossing just shy of $500 million worldwide (in 1996 dollars). It was so popular that it actually kicked off a mini-disaster movie revival, with movies like Dante’s Peak, Volcano, Deep Impact and Armageddon all following in its wake.
Now, twenty-eight years later, Twister is finally getting a quasi-sequel, Twisters, which, to its credit, has some terrific talent involved. That includes two of the most promising rising stars of the moment, Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones, and a unique choice for a director in Minari’s Lee Isaac Chung. But can it live up to the original?
Yes and no.
While Twisters lacks the human touch and characterizations that made the original such an endurable classic, the film does benefit from a few things. For one, this isn’t really a legacy sequel. Those have been hit and miss in the past, and Twisters only has modest connections to the original film. You could walk into this having never heard of the first one and not feel like you were missing anything. While that approach may strike some as disrespectful to the legacy of the original, Lee Isaac Chung, working from a screenplay by Mark L. Smith (and based on a story by Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski), is trying to do his own thing, and it works relatively well.
The reason, of course, is the cast, with Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell two terrific leads to hang this on. Edgar-Jones (who I loved in a cool little horror flick called Fresh) plays Kate, a former storm chaser recovering from a professional tragedy that cost the lives of her old crew, with only Anthony Ramos’s Javi left over. He approaches her, years later, to help him deploy a revolutionary new tracking system, which puts her immediately at odds with Powell’s Tyler Owens. Unlike Javi’s science-minded crew, Owens is a YouTube personality who, along with his colourful gang, seems like a total cowboy, much to Kate’s initial chagrin.
To the movie’s credit, there’s a more formulaic version of it that could have made Powell’s Tyler an antagonist, but instead, they make him a hero. While brash, Tyler’s got a heart of gold. By contrast, Ramos’s Ravi might initially be the shadier one, with him hooked up with a stuck-up storm chaser played by future Superman David Corenswet, who’s clearly up to no good.
The original film pushed the envelope as far as VFX went, and Chung tries many times to top it, using multiple twisters and even a tornado on fire. Alas, the film lacks any of the truly memorable imagery the first film sported, such as that famous flying cow shot or the drive-in theatre screen (playing The Shining) coming apart in a tornado. Bigger isn’t always better.
Yet, Chung does have time to show off some of the grace notes that made Minari such a treat. He truly appreciates down-home Americana, the film stops for a memorable rodeo segment, and the small towns devastated by the titular Twisters have a ring of truth about them.
However, the film also suffers from one thing that’s been bugging me about modern films: the complete avoidance of any physical affection between the leads. The movie largely centers around the deepening relationship between Tyler and Kate. Still, despite the chemistry between the two of them, there’s little to no opportunity for sparks to fly on screen. It’s as if someone along the way decided any hint of romance is reductive, which left a sour taste in my mouth because the movie is begging for it.
Despite this, Twisters still works as a good piece of summer entertainment. The pace is lively, and besides Jones, Powell and Ramos, some of the supporting cast members are fun, such as Sasha Lane as one of Tyler’s cronies and Downton Abbey’s Harry Hadden-Paton as an easily frightened (but not cowardly) journalist following Tyler’s crew. But, at the end of the day, the movie is made by the legit movie star appeal of Powell, who seems to be making a bid to be the next Tom Cruise, with him playing the same kind of brash, heroic, upbeat heroes his former Top Gun: Maverick co-star rose to fame as. Twisters isn’t the instant classic the original was, but it’s a good time at the movies.
