Thanks to its fantastic trailers, I went into Twisters with high hopes. Thanks to my love of its 1996 predecessor, I also went in with high standards. That’s a double dose of heavy expectations for any movie. The fact I walked out of my theater happy says a lot, even though Twisters is far from perfect. Its obvious flaws—including a sometimes clunky script, weird pacing issues, and occasional hokeyness—prevent the movie from true greatness. But those problems are overcome by three fantastic leads, great visual effects, and an engaging mix of fun, excitement, terror, and well-earned heart.
Twisters‘ script is sometimes genuinely funny, sometimes genuinely moving, and sometimes genuinely bad. Some scenes, including the big finale, seem to come out of nowhere, as though director Lee Isaac Chung forgot to film some scenes. Just like a tornado that sprouts up without warning, those structural issues cause damage. There are portions of the film where it feels like a collection of scenes rather than a cohesive story.
The movie also suffers from a few moments or lines of dialogue that cross over from the film’s frequent “good silly” vibe to “bad silly.” On a few occasions, my packed theater laughed at something a character said or plot points that were clearly not meant to be funny. Considering one such moment is a key “conflict” between good guys and bad, that wasn’t ideal. Those failures are especially frustrating because there are scenes where everything in Twisters is absolutely clicking and you know the movie could have avoided its biggest mistakes.
One of those mistakes is that Twisters comes up short in its attempts to recapture the original film’s fundamentally important group dynamic. It never fully commits to that element of the story. We don’t spend enough time with the ragtag storm chasers to feel like we truly know who they are, either as individuals or as friends. It’s not terrible nor bad (and the actual group members are all enjoyable in limited parts); it’s just an aspect of Twisters that feels incomplete even as it’s unfolding.
The film also takes a little while to get going after its predictable yet engrossing opening scene. Fortunately things pick up when Glen Powell’s cowboy storm chaser Tyler Owens shows up. He arrives with a rodeo arena-sized amount of charm and swagger. Powell’s a capital “L” Leading Man and an absolutely perfect fit for the Twister franchise’s ethos. (Which this sequel fully understands.) Powell’s entertaining, funny, brash, smart, and vulnerable.
What—or rather who—really makes Powell shine is his co-star, Daisy Edgar-Jones. She carries the emotional weight of the film that is a big part of why the movie works. An even bigger reason it does is their off-the-charts onscreen chemistry. They’re excellent every single time they’re together and elevate the movie past its issues. Powell and Edgar-Jones as a duo are easily my favorite part of the film.
They aren’t the only standouts in the cast. Twisters‘ third star is Anthony Ramos. He plays an old friend of Edgar-Jones’ tornado whisperer Kate that comes calling with a new opportunity. His offer to her drives the plot (which is perfectly cromulent). Ramos has a tough role, both in terms of the character and his place in the film. It would have been really easy for his Javi to feel like an afterthought or plot device, but Ramos feels just as important to the story as his co-stars. His arc also contributes to the film’s biggest theme about why any of these people do what they do. A lesser performance would have dragged the Twisters down. Instead, like Powell and Edgar-Jones, Ramos lifts up the movie.
As do the movie’s tornadoes. They look totally believable and totally terrifying, even when they’re relatively smaller twisters. I just wish there were more of them. The movie would benefit from at least one more big tornado sequence, but two more would have been even better. Fortunately one of the biggest ones we see is among the scariest natural disaster sequences ever put on film. It takes place at night and I think I forgot to breathe as it unfolded. Watching was like getting caught up in a horror movie you didn’t plan on seeing. I want to see Twisters again on the biggest, loudest screen I can just for this one moment.
If Twisters delivered a better structured ending, one that didn’t feel rushed and out of nowhere, I would have absolutely loved it even despite its obvious flaws. Instead I really liked it. For a film I expected a lot from, that’s still really good. Twisters, which made me laugh, grip my seat, and worry over who would survive, captures a lot of what made the original movie so entertaining and memorable. And it did that while creating even more believable, more terrifying tornadoes, which spun alongside fantastic acting and characters I cared about. It’s not a perfect storm of a movie, but it’s still a damn entertaining one.
Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist and is all ready preparing to see Twisters again. You can follow him on Twitter and Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.
