'Twisters' Is the Summer’s Strongest Soporific

It takes work to make a movie with this much mayhem so boring.

I’ll say this for Twisters: it takes work to make a movie with this much mayhem so boring. So assiduously does the film avoid anything that might have made the story engaging that it’s hard to believe it isn’t a deliberate act of aggression against its audience.

Twisters is nominally a sequel 1996’s Twister, although they’re connected by only a handful of easter eggs. Twister is not a good movie, but director Jan de Bont and screenwriters Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin at least understood the basic building blocks of adventure narrative, like characters with desires and needs and a plot with developments and momentum. Twisters, directed by Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) from a screenplay by Mark L. Smith (Vacancy 2: The First Cut), does not have these things. It is a masterclass in how not to tell a story.

The events depicted in the movie revolve around a young, charisma- and personality-free storm chaser, Daisy Edgar-Jones; she has invented a special baking soda that can stop tornados, like a Tide Stick for whirlwinds. As the film opens, she and some of her peers, including her boyfriend, drive into a tornado to test this miracle remedy, only to find that it doesn’t work as intended. Everyone is killed but Edgar-Jones, who seems surprised to learn that deliberately driving directly into the path of 300 mph winds is dangerous. She thus moves to the big city to work for the National Weather Service, where she can potentially help people from the safety of a desk.

But then one of her old pals who wasn’t killed in that traumatic incident, Anthony Ramos, shows up: he has started a new company to study tornados and needs her borderline supernatural abilities to predict the paths of these deadly storms.

At this point, you probably think you know where Twisters is going: Anthony Ramos is gonna offer Daisy Edgar-Jones the opportunity to test out a new and improved tornado-killing baking soda. It’s gonna be like the original Twister, where Bill Paxton’s character is sucked into events because his former co-workers have made a prototype of his big, potentially life-changing invention. And Edgar-Jones will spend the movie trying to perfect it, thereby redeeming herself for her previous failure.

But no. Anthony Ramos has his own big invention he wants to test out: a trio of high-tech thingamabobs that can make a 3D scan of the tornado. Edgar-Jones has no connection, emotional or otherwise, to this invention, which winds up not being all that important anyway, because eventually her magic Arm & Hammer anti-tornado powder does come back into play, after a completely different character learns about it by accident. Edgar-Jones, in fact, seems very sad that her boyfriend is dead, the only thing she really seems to want to do is to help her buddy out. It’s not exactly the highest of stakes.

The character who will eventually learn about Edgar-Jones’ miracle dust is played by Glen Powell, paying karmic penance for daring to appear in something as fun as Hit Man. Powell’s character is a YouTube tornado influencer (which is not, as far as I can tell, a real thing) who speaks in a formulaic cowboy version of fortune cookie wisdom (e.g., “If you feel it, chase it,” “If you fear it, ride it,” “If you feed it, burp it,” etc.); his character’s greatest need is to get you to smash that like button. Did I mention this movie has a stakes issue?

Because neither Edgar-Jones nor Powell’s respective characters spend 75% of the movie not wanting anything in particular, you wind up with a rudderless plot in which there’s a lot going on but nothing happening. Which leaves you far too much time to ponder how stupid and nonsensical everything is (including the filmmakers’ cowardly decision to never mention climate change in the middle of a movie about extreme weather).

One thing that might have helped would have been giving the talented supporting cast - which includes Love Lies Bleeding’s Katy O'Brian, Pearl’s David Corenswet, Nope’s Brandon Perea, and American Honey’s Sasha Lane - something to do. Alas, no such luck. Corenswet’s character is a one-note jerk who’s just there to be a human antagonist, à la Cary Elwes’ character in the original, O’Brian has about three lines and zero character traits, and Perea and Lane are both ostensibly playing Philip Seymour Hoffman’s role in Twister, but with an eighth of the personality.

I saw Twisters with friends, one of whom was particularly excited about it beforehand; at some point during the movie, she fell asleep. She might be the wisest person I know.