“Twisters”, directed by Lee Isaac Chung (“Minari”) and now showing at most Malco Theaters, is inspired by the 1996 tornado-filled action-adventure “Twister”, which starred Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as storm-chasing exes along with Philip Seymour Hoffman but is not a sequel or a remake but rather a new film, same subject, hoping to repeat its predecessor’s blockbuster box office magic.
GET YOUR TWISTERS TICKETS HERE.
The movie opens with “young Anne Hathaway-resembling”Daisy Edgar-Jones as meteorologist Kate Cooper who, together with some like-minded friends, are all on a tornado-taming project in which they try to ambush an approaching tornado by filling it with a large amount of super-absorbent polymers in hopes of making it shrink or disappear. The plan fails and, with a second storm right behind, they are caught in death’s wind-blown, water-logged grip with only Kate and one other friend, Javi (Anthony Ramos), surviving the barometric pressure onslaught. Five years pass by in the blink of an eye and Kate, working for a weather-charting agency in New York City, has been tracked down by Javi who is working with a military-funded three-part sensor system he developed which can triangulate a tornado in hopes of saving lives by warning people in advance who are in its projected path.
At first reticent, still shell-shocked Kate gives in and, before you know it, she’s back in Oklahoma’s Tornado Alley in America’s heartland where she meets full-of-swagger, Stetson-hatted, big belt buckle-wearing, egocentric (but actually altruistic) Arkansas native Tyler Owens (dimpled, charismatic movie star heartthrob with a bullet Glen Powell), a self-proclaimed “tornado wrangler” who, with his ragtag crew of initially-annoying misfits and a British journalist in tow, chase twisters apparently for entertainment purposes, obnoxiously live-streaming his exploits on YouTube. Whether or not sparks will eventually fly between the two leads is a moot point along with a subplot about Javi and his questionable motives orchestrated at the behest of his profiteering boss.
If viewers don’t mind a blaring country music-heavy soundtrack including Lainey Wilson, Miranda Lambert and Jelly Roll with Alexandra Kay, some cases of poorly-written dialogue, an overload of technobabble tornado information (which some may find interesting) and some predictable situations, then “Twisters” hits the mark thanks to the main things that make the popcorn movie WELL-WORTH SEEING such as the initial tornado early sequence, multiple mid-film tornadoes, the climactic storm finale and the overall outstanding, spectacular special effects utilizing huge-scale set pieces of trucks smashing into buildings, a fire tornado, a rodeo tornado, a collapsing water tower, property, livestock and people being sucked skyward to certain destruction and death, a twin tornado, a decimated town plus some nice “Wizard of Oz”references which, all things considered, result in an entertaining, rousing, edge-of-one’s-seat, nail-biting, exciting, solid 3 out of 4 star blockbuster thrill ride .
Staying through the initial end credits is a MUST in order to complete the storyline. Don’t worry too much about brushing your hair before seeing the film—it’s a windy, wet, hail-filled two hours you’re in for.
