Director: Lee Isaac Chung

Writer: Mark L. Smith

Stars: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, and Anthony Ramos

Running Time: 122 minutes

Please note there may be spoilers below.

Kate Carter (Daisey Edgar Jones) is a prototypical reluctant hero, one with a gift for tornado whispering – she can in effect foresee the behavior of a tornado before it happens. She can look at the darkening horizon and tell fellow scientists their data is wrong – the storm will, in fact, turn right. In her younger life she was also an inventor, with the fine idea of unleashing a chemical into a tornado to diminish its power, but at the ripe age of 26 she has turned her back on her dream of changing the world. Yet by the end of Twisters’ first act, things aren’t so bad. Two men are in love with her.

Twisters continues it’s predecessors strength of providing plenty of cinematic damage. By the end credits, tornadoes get a chance to destroy a rodeo, a power station, a movie theater, a water tower, but from what I can tell, no cows. What is fresh to the formula is the injection of a teenage romance plot straight from a YA novel. This new addition simultaneously freshens up the typical disaster movie material, adding an enjoyable dose of campy irony, but leaves the final result shallow and forgettable. The real crime is relegating heroic lead Kate Carter to role of a Mary Sue, a character whose complexity is unfortunately limited by her persistent brilliance.

There’s still a lot of artificial fun to be had. Cowboy tornado ‘wrangler’ and YouTube star Tyler Owens (Glenn Powell) is the more handsome point of this love triangle, often seen swaggering through the Oklahoma rain in the tight T-shirt and smiling with the whitest teeth in the state. Powell reaffirms himself to be an actor who performs well as the confident risk taker, who isn’t comfortable unless he’s driving directly into the eye of a twister to terrify the stuffy British journalist who’s covering him. He’s a caricature of a certain type of country music-Americana, with his custom Dodge Ram and his oversized belt buckle. In case the message was too subtle, it is also revealed he was once a rodeo cowboy who quit the business because he was kicked in the head too many times. Thankfully his face remained completely in tact.

The last point of this triangle is Javi (Anthony Ramos), Kate’s old storm chaser colleague. He’s boring, of course. Most of his time is spent telling Kate how brilliant she is and reminding her that she’s got a gift no one else has. He carries the torment of unrequited love in every pocket of his starched business shirt. He’s a thinker, you see. We know this because he’ll often stare at Kate, thinking. But unfortunately for him all-American male Tyler Owen is a doer. We know this because his motto is “If you feel it, chase it!”

The film is also willing to trick you. The chess pieces are laid out for you to hate Tyler Owens and his obnoxious brand of clickbait showmanship, whilst elevating Javi to a dignified scientist just trying to crunch the data. But the second hour completely rearranges the game in reverse, and the pleasure you’ll take from this is entirely dependent on your tolerance for a heavy-handed magic trick.

But none of it matters when the big tornado comes. It’s still undoubtedly fun to hear a character remind us a particular tornado is the largest on the EF scale. And isn’t watching a twister tear through a power station and light the sky on fire the type of summer movie spectacle we crave on date night? There’s a part of Twisters that’s hyper-aware of itself – if the first movie remains a sincere attempt to continue disaster movie tradition, Twisters could almost be framed as an ironic remake with little connection to the 1996 original. It’s more of a Stephanie Meyer novel with extra wind. It’s very aware of the tropes its using, but it’s never dynamic enough to subvert those cliches. It’s mired in the conventions it’s stealing from, but unable to makes its own story distinct.

Still, Twisters is a movie eager to please. It wears it’s cliched heart on its sleeve and ends on a note so smile inducingly cheesy, Danielle Steele could have written it. This is a movie not afraid to write itself into a trap of goofy romance, and there’s a genuine enjoyment in watching how it manoeuvres towards a conclusion that’s winking at you the whole time. The self awareness is surprising, not least because director Lee Isaac Chung’s previous film, Minari, is such a love letter to sincerity.

As another tornado comes, as Kate Carter faces her greatest fear, as Tyler Owens dips his cowboy hat, and as Javi realizes he’s not even important enough to have a second name, I was drowning in the mix of shallow fun and light disappointment. It’s a summer movie brave enough to embrace the creative and cheeky idea of combining cheesy romance and natural disasters, but the material remains too comfortable cribbing notes from cliched sources when it should be inventing new ones.