TWISTERS directed by Lee Isaac Chung (USA, 2024)
I was caught in a swirling maelstrom, emotionally battered and clinging on for dear life – this was my experience of sitting through two hours of this dismal movie at my local cinema last night.
I survived to tell the tale but only just.
I accept that you don’t go to disaster movies expecting deep insights into the human condition but some recognition that we the audience are not universally brain dead would have been nice.
The appeal of these films is that you can enjoy apocalyptic scenes of death and destruction from the safety and comfort of your cinema seat or armchair. But in Twisters, even these moments are a let down. Partly this is due to the lack of genuine tension. When a group of people choose to drive into the heart of major storm zones why should we really care if they get out alive or not?
Sadly, most of the cast here do defy all odds and come out wildly whooping and boasting like the imbeciles they are. This unfortunately means that they will live to make a sequel. Until the spectre of Twisters 3 breaks like the wind onto global screens, we are left to marvel at just how woefully bad the screenplay is here, how lame the acting is and wonder at what point characterization becomes so stereotypical as to border on the offensive.
I was particularly outraged by the London journalist Ben (Harry Hadden-Paton) who is about as dynamic as the energy vampire Colin Robinson in What We Do In The Shadows. The stoked-up cowboys and cowgirls have a field day mocking his prim English fears. This is what racism looks like, guys.
They all laugh in the face of death under the slogan “You Don’t Face Your Fears – You Ride ‘Em.”, the catchphrase of rugged man of action Tyler Owens who initially seems like a brash dickhead from hell but reveals a sensitive side of sorts when ‘city girl’ Kate proves that her intuitive weather forecasting skills are greater than his. (n.b. Even after this volte-face, he still seems to me like a brash dickhead from hell!)
Tyler is played by Glen Powell, so impressive in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, so awful here. The rabbit-in-the-headlights look of Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kate quickly becomes tiresome and she seems totally miscast. But then again, what acting skills can she, or anyone else for that matter, bring to roles that are so poorly scripted. After being a stranger to her mother for years Kate returns home casually apologizing for not being in touch as if she’d been gone for just a couple of nights.
As she and the other marauding morons strive to monitor and control a relentless stream of tornadoes, you wait in vain for someone to wonder why these twisters are getter bigger and more destructive. Could this perhaps have something to do with climate change or am I just being too woke? The redneck viewers (the target audience judging by the hideous soundtrack) would baulk at any suggestion that human ignorance and capitalist greed could play a part in this ‘natural’ phenomena. Perish the thought!
You have been warned. Twisters is much more than a simple disaster movie. It is the disaster.
