★★
If the omnipresent memory of Jan de Bont’s agitation in 1996 Tornado is a picture of bovine aeronautics, it’s hard to imagine how instantly less iconic its 2024 sequel, from to the pain director Lee Isaac Chung, will be remembered. Perhaps only in retrospectives examining Glen Powell’s steep rise to stardom. Two decades of corruption are behind the chiseled Texan’s supposed overnight success. After making his debut in 2003’s third Spy Kids movie, Powell has managed to navigate his way through it all since The Dark Knight Rises has Consumables 3. The winds changed with Top Gun: Maverick And Anyone but you but now they are really in the middle of a storm.
Powell is one of a small group of saving graces in Twists, a sequence pluralized in all senses. He plays tornado-fighting “scientific cowboy” Tyler Owens, a mountain man with more than a million YouTube subscribers and cargo to move. And yet, there may be more to the perfect smile and charisma that meets the eye. Maybe, behind his casual disregard for his own safety, this beef knows a thing or two about meteorology. Vulnerability seems to be a winning niche for Powell, with fallibilities being emphasized just enough, but never to the point of undermining the action hero image. No one ever called Tom Cruise a “hot, fit girl.” It works for Powell.
Daisy Edgar-Jones’ Kate Carter, a beautiful spirit not so far removed from the star’s last and only other major film role in Where the Crawdads Sing. Much like Kya Clark, Kate dances the fine line between cool-headed scientist and air whisperer. As with Kya, Kate navigates a cruel world with trauma bubbling not so far beneath the surface. It’s the memory of the film’s horror-tinged prologue and its best scenes. Young and naive Kate leads her naive young friends into the heart of an EF5 tornado, backed by the brilliance of her own research, only to have each one wiped out by 200+ mph winds. It’s devastating and too morbid to watch.
A leap to the future sees Kate carve out a new life in the city as a New York meteorologist. It’s safer but less organically her. We know this because she looks miserable, even when she’s outwitting her co-workers. The lure of Oklahoma, however, is strong. Sure enough, there’s no need to convince Javi (Anthony Ramos), another storm chaser turned white-collar worker, to bring her back. In reality, it is the love of the land and the vast expanses of the state that calls him, but there is a lot of talk about making a difference and saving lives. Tornadoes are becoming stronger, deadlier and more frequent. Kate’s genius is the missing piece in Javi’s team of gust chasers.
Aside from the film’s goodwill credentials – much of it is charitable efforts and community support – something is amiss. Faced with changing weather conditions, no one makes a single reference to climate change. It is simply accepted that twenty-eight years and an extra “s” in the title creates a more dangerous situation. Moreover, Twists opposes science to experience in its narrative flow. Perhaps there is reason to be wary of a film that portrays experts as cold, fallacious and motivated by profiteering, against the real, red-blooded, salt-of-the-Earth American vigilantes.
This might matter less, certainly to the average moviegoer, if the film were more engaging. Well-executed storm sequences quicken the pulse in fits and starts, but Twists lack of solidity in its foundations. When the wind drops, the rhythm follows. As for Powell and Edgar-Jones, there’s a head-to-head thrill that’s pleasant enough but barely more compelling than the average Hallmark Christmas movie, with which the film shares its basic DNA – but with less breadth of d ‘spicy.
T.S.