Movie review: ‘Twisters’ easy to bash, equally easy to enjoy

Sometimes all you’re looking for is a good show. “Twisters” is fairly risible on a script level, but it amply delivers on two of the commodities we go to the movies for: big star personalities and big screen spectacle.

It’s an easy movie to make fun of, and equally easy to enjoy.

The film is a follow-up to the 1996 disaster movie “Twister,” but not in any plot sense. The only “returning star” from the original film is the titular column of air.

Our heroes are a pair of mismatched storm chasers. Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) spent years trying to develop technology that could disperse tornados until a tragedy sent her behind a desk. She’s been called back into the field by an old friend (Anthony Ramos) to track a cluster of tornadoes threatening to touch ground near her old hometown.

Her opposite number is Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a YouTube superstar who refers to himself as a tornado wrangler and likes to drive his GoPro-laden car straight into the middle of twisters.

They’re a classic oil and water pair, so how much do you want to bet that they’ll end up being opposites who attract?

If you’re looking to pick holes in “Twisters,” it’s not hard. The movie’s script frequently feels like it was spat out by Chat GPT — every character arc is predictable, and the dialogue that isn’t “we need to move!” or “look out!” largely consists of boilerplate exposition. “We have to help people!” Kate is constantly saying, just in case we forget for 30 seconds that saving other people from tornado-related tragedy is her defining character motivation.

“Twisters” not infrequently feels like a movie written (as Mark Kermode would put it) for the “hard of thinking.”

The movie also awkwardly pushes real science into a blockbuster-shaped mold. Kate’s ability to predict where tornadoes are going to touch down isn’t just intuition.

As visually depicted by director Lee Isaac Chung and cinematographer Dan Mindel, it basically amounts to a superpower — Kate is able to sense the weather in computer generated visions that bring to mind Spider-Man’s fabled “Spider Sense.”

The tornados in the film aren’t just weather anomalies but almost malevolent forces, threatening to crush small towns like a supervillain descending with his army, and our heroes aren’t just curious scientists, but do-gooders constantly rushing into danger in ways that ultimately play as a bit silly.

You’d think a severe weather warning on everyone’s cell phone would suffice, but I guess not. “Twisters” makes it appear it’s Powell’s personal duty to drag people to safety during the middle of a calamitous weather event.

But we don’t always go to the movies to have profound experiences, and if what you’re looking for is charismatic actors chasing digital tornados around, “Twisters” delivers.

Director Lee Isaac Chung has a good sense of scale. Even if the VFX laden tornado sequences don’t always look “convincing,” they always have a sense of scale, and the set piece sequences are chaotic without becoming confusing.

He’s also very fortunate in that all three of his main leads, Powell, Edgar-Jones and Ramos, are innately likable. None of these people really have characters to play, but all three actors are giving actual performances as though their personalities aren’t collections of cliches.

Powell continues to demonstrate that he’s got real leading-man chops — cocky and confident in action scenes, he’s equally convincing when his character has to let his guard down and get sincere — and Edgar-Jones is just as good, making her character believably earnest and traumatized.

If the success of effects movies largely comes down to the actors in them, then most of the relative success of “Twisters” is owed to these actors, who really seem like they’re looking up in awe or terror at a dangerous tornado, rather than standing on a green screen stage with a fan blowing in their faces.

“Twisters” is almost the platonic ideal of what “summer popcorn movies” are supposed to be — dumb, shallow spectacle, but fun.

The multiplex audience watching alongside me enjoyed it — they laughed at the jokes, gasped during some of the big suspense set pieces, and were rooting for the two leads, who have old-fashioned romantic comedy chemistry.

I had a pretty good time, too, while acknowledging that the film is basically fast food — you eat it, it passes painlessly through you and leaves no aftertaste. But I can’t deny it felt good in the moment.

C.B. Jacobson is an Annandale native who makes independent films at Buddy Puddle Productions, and writes about movies at picturegoer.substack.com. Keep an eye peeled for him at the Emagine Monticello movie theater on Tuesday nights — seated in the middle of the auditorium, with a book in hand.