You can say what you like about Glen Powell. And many people do, however unfairly – that he came out of nowhere, that he’s a dumb jock in place of a leading man, that he looks like a capybara (ok, that one’s fair). But the star of Hit Man, Top Gun: Maverick and Anyone But You really knows how to pick a blockbuster. Because Twisters is set to be the box office smash of the summer.
Twisters is a reboot of 1996’s Twister, which was also a box office smash, raking in $494.5 million worldwide; perhaps a good indication of audience interest in weather-based action movies. But Twisters is unrelated to the original other than its characters being beset by tornadoes. A bad script would have killed it, especially as the original hardly has the cult following that brings an inbuilt audience — it wasn’t exactly a Top Gun: Maverick no-brainer.
Twisters follows the story of Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones), an Oklahoma native with a knack for predicting tornadoes and a desire to minimise their damage. “The worse the weather, the happier the girl,” her mother Cathy (Maura Tierney) says. Until one of Kate’s beloved tornadoes does what tornadoes do best, and sucks up a bunch of her loved ones, making Kate very unhappy. It’s a devastating loss that shows Twisters means business, straight out of the gate.
Five years later, Javi (Anthony Ramos), the lovelorn last remaining member of Kate’s storm-hunting crew, turns up at her fancy new New York job to try and reel her back in. You know the drill. There’s an unprecedented amount of tornadoes plaguing Oklahoma at the moment, and Kate’s the only one who can help them work out why. And maybe, just maybe, she could help put a stop to it.
As Kate returns to Oklahoma to follow her chimeras and chase down tornados, she’s introduced to twister-chasing cowboy and former bull rider Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), who is as irritating as he is endearing. While Kate and her science boys track the twisters for science, he and his rag-tag group of enjoyable hick weirdos (played by Sasha Blane, Brandon Perea, Tunde Adebimpe and Katy O’Brian, all marvellous) drive straight into the eye of the storm and set fireworks off in it.
The two groups butt heads throughout, with their division just as enjoyable as their inevitable acquiescence. Powell and Edgar-Jones are natural leads, with enough charisma to do it alone. But Twisters actually plays like an accidental ensemble movie, and its supporting cast members make it sing.
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The action is equal parts thrilling and emotional, with one particularly good scene in a motel swimming pool that echoes Kate’s first tornado accident being so intense and unyielding that it felt like the whole cinema went through a joint panic attack.
It has its cheesy moments, of course - like the multiple shots of Tyler Owens’ “See You In Hail” bumper sticker, or the moment when Kate drives home to her Oklahoma farm for the first time in years and Lainey Wilson croons “Can't take the home out of Oklahoma, It's where my soul was born to be (Home).” And it does seem willfully negligent in its lack of referencing climate change, even when that path has been nicely laid out by the best climate thrillers of our past (i.e The Day After Tomorrow).
But ultimately, it’s a thrilling, smarter-than-it-seems blockbuster, not necessarily in its science but in its writing, action and tightness. So much so that people in my screening clapped at the end - something I haven’t seen in years. And, also for the first time in years, the film ended about 30 minutes before I thought it would, thanks to its reasonable two hour two minutes runtime. All in all, it left me wanting more. Glen Powell, you’ve done it again.
