Impossible to doze through, sadly: Twisters reviewed

Twisters is an action-disaster film that follows ‘storm-chasers’ and is so relentless in its own pursuit of tornadoes that plot, character and dialogue are also thrown to the wind. It has a classy cast (Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell) and a classy director (Lee Isaac Chung) but if you believe, as I do, that once you’ve seen one big storm you’ve seen them all don’t expect any mercy. This never lets you off the hook and is so furiously and incessantly loud that a doze is impossible. God knows I tried.

That may be too harsh. The film does what it says on the tin, which is subject you to extremely bad weather over and over. You think tornadoes are rare events? Think again, as in Oklahoma there seems to be a violent, crashing one every two minutes.

There must be a market for it as this is a remake of the 1996 film Twister although, in this instance, it’s been written by Mark L. Smith (rather than Michael Crichton) and directed by Chung, who is the biggest surprise of this endeavour. He, you may remember, wrote and directed Minari, that gorgeously slow, gentle and sensitive film about a South Korean immigrant family trying to make it as farmers in Arkansas. I do wonder now: was he always eyeing up grandma and imagining how she might be lashed with rain and hurled into the air? Was this film in him even then?

It’s not the sort of thing you’d expect from him, but here we are. And here’s Edgar-Jones playing Kate, a storm-chasing scientist who, her mother will later tell us, ‘always loved weather’. Other choice lines include ‘if you feel it you should chase it’, and ‘you don’t face your fears, you ride ‘em’ – and ‘you’re no fun since you were struck by lightning’ which, to be fair, I get.