Finally, after 28 years, we get Twisters — the sequel to Twister that people demanded. Many is the day I woke up to peaceful protesters marching and chanting, “Less Barbados! More tornados!”
It’s a slippery slope (of a roof) to revisit a concept nearly three decades later, but that is the kind of risk Hollywood loves to take. Why think up something new? That might sprain brains.
I know what you’re wondering. Did all of the resources committed to Twisters get used up to think up the clever title? Does that make it Aliens to Alien? Or, at least Predators to Predator?
Many reviews are singing the praises of Twisters. I don’t know what kind of dope those critics are smoking. Whatever it is, they should seek out the nearest methadone clinic posthaste.
Twisters Off
The leading lady in Twister, Helen Hunt, originally wanted to write and direct the sequel. Her attempts were rebuffed, however. Damn that Hollywood patriarchy.
They should have let her do it. She could not have done much worse.
Twisters is instead directed by Lee Isaac Chung. You know him. He directed that episode of The Mandalorian. You know the one. It had Star Wars stuff in it and that baby Yoda thing that made Facebook moms everywhere sudden meme lords.
Chung does not come close to Jan De Bont’s work on Twister. That is not surprising. De Bont has movies like Die Hard and Speed on his resume.
Nevertheless, one hoped Chung could deliver the big dumb we expect from movies like this. All we need is action, a flying cow and an “Is there an F5?” moment.
Sorry, we get none of that. Twisters is 122 minutes long, and you know what I watched more than the screen after sixty minutes? My watch.
Mark L. Smith is responsible for the screenplay. Smith penned movies like Vacancy, The Hole, Martyrs, The Revenant and Overlord, which I don’t like because my Nazi action/horror book was better. Plus, it had werewolves.
Regardless, talent exists there. Likewise, the story for Twisters came from Joseph Kosinski. He directed Tron: Legacy and worked with the man who doesn’t own a phone, Tom Cruise, on Oblivion and Top Gun: Maverick.
Kosinski also grew up in small-town Iowa, so he gets the world that Twisters takes place in.
So, what went wrong?
Let’s Do The Twisters
No one from the original cast returns. That is fine. It would be too bittersweet without Bill Paxton, one of the most beloved character actors to grace the screen. RIP.
Paxton’s son, James, has a cameo, however. He plays a disgruntled motel guest.
Daisy Jessica Edgar-Jones gets top billing and the award for longest cast member name. She starred in Where The Crawdads Sing, which the ladies love and the men meh.
Edgar-Jones plays a woman who desires to get revenge on tornados for killing her friends. She plans to do this by devising a method to stop tornados in their tracks.
Edgar-Jones is given a tough row to hoe in this movie. Don’t hate the player, though. Hate the game. It is a miscasting, big time. A role like this requires a woman, not a waif. Edgar-Jones looks like the girl who played the lead in your high school musical and based her performance on Kristen Stewart in Twilight.
Next on the cast list is the current flavor-of-the-month being groomed for the position of top leading man now that Brad Pitt is aging out: Glen Powell. Looking at Powell’s credits, he’s been around longer than thought. He started in 2003 with a Spy Kids entry. He was even in The Dark Knight Rises.
Powell plays a YouTube tornado chaser sensation. Powell is okay in the role, but he has little to do. The movie thinks the Edgar-Jones character can carry the day, but she couldn’t carry a bag of groceries.
Twisters makes you realize Twister somehow managed to present genuine characters despite its dumbness. For example, Paxton started out as a man who left the business for the quiet life and got sucked back in. That gave his character somewhere to go. He also started in a relationship with Jami Gertz and ended up back with Hunt.
There is a journey there. It may not be deep, but it is something.
The characters in Twisters have nothing.
Twisters and Shout
Supporting Edgar-Jones and Powell is their crew. They are made up of folks like Anthony Ramos (Godzilla: King of Monsters), Brandon Perea (Nope) and Harry Hadden-Paton (Downton Abbey).
None of them pop off the screen. Their characters are simply there to yell and try to be funny. They aren’t.
Twisters follows the general model of Twister, in that there are two teams. Things are a bit reversed this time around, though. The movie spends more time with the “bad” team, although it is not revealed they are bad until the third act.
Basically, the man funding their team is taking advantage of tornado victims by offering them cash for their destroyed property.
It is as lame as it sounds. Plus, it gets no resolution.
Meanwhile, the “good” team, led by Powell, gets in the bad team’s way.
This is another area where Twisters fails. Twister had a lot of familiar faces in the trenches: Cary Elwes, Jami Gertz, Alan Ruck, Jeremy Davies, Zach Grenier, Jake Busy, Joey Slotnick, Sean Whalen and even Philp Seymour Hoffman.
All of these characters came off as real people, and the performers soaked up the screen when they were featured.
All of the supporting characters in Twisters are so milquetoast they may as well be buttered. Not a single one of them is likeable. They don’t even get to at least be tornado fodder. We have to put up with every one of them for the entire film.
Plot Twisters
Twister had a plot. It may have been simple, but it was a plot. The team had the goal of placing a sensor in the path of a tornado and getting it sucked up to take measurements.
Twisters has no plot. The beginning of the film showcases an experiment that is an attempt to stop a tornado. It doesn’t work. The movie then forgets about that for two full acts. The characters just kind of meander about and chase tornados while hooting and hollering.
Finally, in the third act, the experiment to stop a tornado is revisited. By then, we don’t care. We just want to be done with this futile collection of nothingness.
And you want to know the truly crazy part?
The tornado scenes and effects in Twister are superior! Twister is from 1996. This is 2024. Soak that in. How does that happen? That alone should get everyone on Twisters fired.
One theory is that the effects in Twisters try to portray realistic tornados. The effects in Twister tried to portray cinematic tornadoes. Twister took the better approach. A realistic tornado looks like a hazy cloud of nothing hugging the ground. That is what you get in Twisters.
If I was truly ambitious, I would get a stopwatch out and time the tornado scenes in both movies. I have a sneaking suspicion that Twister would win handily. It seems like there is precious little tornado action in Twisters. There goes another $200 million down the drain.
Don’t Get Your Panties In A Twisters
Bottomline: Twisters sucks and blows. It is a far cry from the original.
Believe it or not, when the first trailer for Twister dropped back in 1996, it hit hard. It actually hit harder than any other trailer I have witnessed in the theater (I never saw the Terminator 2 teaser in a theater).
When the wheel blew into the windshield, and the screen cut to black at the end of the trailer, you can bet everyone in the theater was primed to be there opening day. Just dead, shocked awe.
This made the first Twister a sneaky “event” movie. Man vs. tornados was a totally new thing. We had not seen anything like it in the mainstream.
Since then, we have gotten tornados with sharks in them. I have never watched any of the Sharknado movies, but I’d feel safe betting money they are better than Twisters. It is a misfire on all levels.
Skip this one, kids. Go watch Twister again. It doesn’t make you a boomer clinging to the past. It is simply the better movie by far. It’s not art, but it is crafted by people who can deliver entertainment.
