Movie review: Twisters 2

Twisters 2 is billed as a stand-alone sequel to the 1996 Twister. The main lead, Kate Carter, loses 3 of her friends tragically in a tornado chasing experiment that went spectacularly wrong. She gives up her ambitions and goes to work at a NOAA office in New York. Five years later, she is called back into the field by her friend Javi, who was with her on that fateful day. He offers her a week-long assignment to test a new tornado scanning system. Tornadoes are on the rise and specifically in Oklahoma.

Since I really enjoyed the first movie with Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton, I thought I would enjoy Twisters 2 which promised to have ‘more teeth’ (to quote Jurassic Park). Honestly, if all you want is special effects and more tornadoes than any regular storm chaser can stomach, this is the movie for you. If you want real acting and a plot, skip it. The leading lady is, alas, the ubiquitous skinny blonde with no real expression beyond staring into the distance. Note: staring is not acting. As a result, the rest of the enormous and wildly diverse cast act their hearts out and come across as frenzied in comparison. Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kate is eminently forgettable while her opposite, the male heartthrob lead Glenn Powell (currently creating a Hollywood storm) vacillates between megawatt smiles for his followers on social media and clumsy attempts to be sensitive. The actors who are gems do manage to stand out despite the lack of screen time and significant lines. Worthy of mention are Daryl McCormack as Kate’s longtime friend Javi, who really deserved more on screen, and Sasha Lily Lane as team member and drone pilot, wearing the tattiest dreadlocks imaginable. The other various team members and groupies merge into a mass of manufactured hysteria every time a tornado peeks over the horizon. Adults in the room include Harry Hadden-Paton as the Brit reporter tagging along and Maura Tierney who is so good she can convey volumes with just a glance.

The very thin underlying plot is how an unscrupulous developer is cruising along in the wake of the tornadoes’ havoc, buying up properties from families devastated by the event. This could have been fleshed out into something spectacular and worthy of watching. Instead, we are forced to swallow total high school science project guff about putting sodium polyacrylate beads into the tornado that will decrease it almost instantly; well, as instantly as screen time and science fiction allow. ‘Terrible dialogue and the acting was a joke,’ said one movie reviewer and I have to agree. So much potential was wasted on casting that put ‘diversity’ (whatever that means these days) before talent, so you get a giant cast that looks like a United Nations convention with very little memorable coming out of it, bar McCormack and Tierney.

The special effects are spectacular and, as I said, if that’s all you want, you’ll get it. The tornadoes have improved since Helen and Bill went chasing after them in a beat-up old pick-up. Watching on the big screen will definitely show audiences how savage these aerial ‘beasts’ can be, but even watching on a smaller TV screen does not diminish the effects. The various tornado events include a tornado happening at a rodeo which was spectacularly filmed. I love disaster movies, but this one was 2 hours too long. I have watched many disaster movies over and over, 2012 and San Andreas being two examples. But these movies had stories with heart. Sadly, the director Lee Isaac Chung (who says he watched many Spielberg movies) missed the point of why and how a Spielberg movie works and the reason it succeeds.