Hollywood is constantly on the look out for franchises to reboot these days. ‘The Fall Guy‘ got it’s first feature film earlier this year after being off the air for 38 years. So it just makes sense that they would resurrect a crowd pleasing disaster movie series with a sequel in Lee Isaac Chung directed ‘Twisters‘. While the efforts to find pay dirt amongst long dead franchises might be a little tiring, it’s no nowhere near as tiring as what we were witnessing in recent years with every single well performing movie being a superhero film, a race largely lead by Kevin Feige’s MCU.

But now it’s 2024, and we have up and comer Daisy Edgar-Jones, alongside a young star on a hot streak Glenn Powell, in a legacy sequel about tornadoes. Daisy portraying Kate Cooper, a young scientist who goes through a traumatic tornado experience at the start of the film as she’s trying to demonstrate that she can destabilize a tornado, so as to keep people and property away from it’s devastating force. In this scene she loses two of her friends, and her boyfriend as a terrifying EF-5 tornado touches down and pulls most of her crew into it’s wake of destruction.

We jump ahead and five years later Kate is working a desk job in New York City for the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) helping to determine the threat level of storms. She is visited by the only other surviving member of her crew Javi (Anthony Ramos) and convinced to come back to Oklahoma to help him study tornadoes so that they can have better tools to prevent them and warn people in the future.

But much akin to the first film, the plot is the least important part of the movie. Character and chemistry, along with stressful tornado based set pieces are the most effective parts of the film. And while there’s solid work from Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glenn Powell is his usual charismatic confident self, the structure of the film leaves little room for them to actually spend time together and do the thing we’d want from a film like this, fall in love. There are flashes of it to be sure, the parts of ‘Twisters‘ that work the best are very similar to the parts of ‘Twister‘ that worked the best, put these two people that are having a fight in the middle of a storm, and watch the fireworks fly. In this film there are literal fireworks, if not as many metaphorical ones.

The issue is primarily Daisy, though while film Twitter has it out for her, I’m not convinced it’s her fault. Her character goes through gut wrenching trauma at the beginning of the movie, and prior to the trauma, Daisy has real visceral chemistry with her soon to be 86’d boyfriend Jeb (Daryl McCormack) so we know she’s capable of it. It’s just that through most of the movie she’s carrying hesitancy, and not the hesitancy that Bill Paxton had in the first movie. She has actual understandable real trauma and has carried it for five years at this point. It’s no wonder she often feels like a bit of a wet blanket when put against the always loose and cool YouTuber Tyler Owens (Glenn Powell’s character) and his cadre of Tornado Wranglers. The movie sets up a very serious problem against the backdrop of a rather silly plot, in that at one point there is indeed, a fire tornado. It’s hard to have serious mental health conversations around a set piece that belongs in an MCU movie.

Something that I thought the movie was doing well however is also not exactly in lock step with Film Twitter™. And that’s the conversation around how it handles the subject of catatrophic climate change. While it never uses the words in that order, it’s absolutely a thesis of the film. Lee Isaac Chung has gone on record about how movies shouldn’t be “preachy” and many took that to mean apolitcal. I found this movie to be saying all the words around the crisis without using the phrase climate change, and I respect a movie that doesn’t spoon feed me, so it was rather refreshing. Even towards the end when Daisy risks her own life to stop the tornado, and the rest of the crew and population of the town hide inside a movie theater seemed to be exclusively about catastrophic climate change. While mitigation will save lives, there must be risk invovled with positive change if we want our problem to get better.

But the biggest disappointment is still the lack of chemistry between stars Powell and Edgar-Jones. I feel the with a little more screenvtime together, and a lighter plot point at the beginning we could’ve gotten there. But as it stands our star crossed lovers do little to move the needle and never even share a kiss. It’s a regular problem in modern cinema blockbusters that end up feeling sexless and dull. It feels like the most risque thing a movie could do is showcase a public display of affection, and much like the fire tornado, this decison feels very at home in a less well put together MCU movie.

So well it is fun and showy, the tornado scenes are often stress inducing, and the actors are giving us what they can, ‘Twisters‘ feels a little hamstrung by indecision or more aptly, the wrong decisions being made. It is absolutely better than it has any right to be, but still plays it safe while showing the film makers have the wherewithal to make it a truly spectacular movie. If only they were just a little bit less risk averse.

3/5