Tom Cruise protégé Glen Powell is on a remarkable run thanks to his flair for heroics. As Top Gun: Maverick’s “Hangman,” Powell rescues fellow Navy pilots behind enemy lines. In the sleeper romantic comedy hit Anyone But You, he dives into an Australian harbor for Sydney Sweeney. Netflix’s Hit Man features Powell as a quick-witted undercover agent who saves a desperate housewife from a disastrous marriage. The rising star’s winning streak continues in Twisters. Only this time, the 35-year-old actor isn’t just saving lives on screen — he snatches the film from the clutches of tedium.
A follow-up to the 1996 hit, Twisters retains much of its predecessor’s successful formula with a new storyline and cast. We’re introduced to Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a dedicated Ph.D. student researching tornadoes in her native Oklahoma. Joined by her boyfriend and three friends, they use the iconic Dorothy doppler system from the original film to track if shooting barrels of a sodium polyacrylate solution into a tornado can disrupt a storm. If so, they will secure crucial funding for their potentially life-saving research.
Much like Bill Harding (the late Bill Paxton’s character in the original), Kate’s somewhat of a weather whisperer. Unfortunately, at this early stage in her career, she’s more Padawan than Jedi, and a miscalculation puts her team directly in the path of a devastating EF5 tornado — the kind dubbed “the finger of God” in the original. While Kate and Javi (Anthony Ramos) survive, her boyfriend and two research companions are tragically lost. This intense opening sets a high bar that the film’s subsequent action sequences not only meet but often surpass.
Five years later, a physically and emotionally scarred Kate has settled into a comfortable desk job at New York’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Her decision to distance herself from her past life is understandable given her trauma, but everything changes when Javi reappears. He’s been trying to reach Kate because he wants her to return to Oklahoma for another chase, this time to deploy a new 3-D tornado modeling technology he acquired with investor backing after a four-year military stint. Despite her initial reluctance, Kate agrees to help him for a week.
This introduces a key problem with the story. In the original, you can accept that Bill — who, legend has it, once hurled a bottle of Jack Daniels into a tornado while naked — still has an itch to scratch, especially given his unresolved feelings for his ex (Helen Hunt) on the brink of a shotgun wedding to an urbane therapist he has little in common with. The setup in Twisters is less convincing.
Kate is undeniably talented (and cute), so you can kind of see why Javi would want her on his team despite her inadvertently getting three of their friends killed and ignoring his calls. But why would she go along? She’s not interested in him, her PTSD is so severe that she barely answers her mother’s calls, and she avoids Oklahoma the way Texans avoid vegan brisket.
This shaky foundation would be easier to overlook if Kate weren’t written as a Debbie Downer. Edgar-Jones is a talented actress, but for much of the film, her character comes across like her last fun night out was posted on MySpace, constantly reminding us of the movie’s flawed premise. Fortunately, YouTube sensation Tyler “Tornado Wrangler” Owens (Powell) and his motley crew swoop in to rescue audiences from getting sucked into a vortex of boredom.
Like the original, Twisters pits a ragtag group of storm chasers against polished, but ethically dubious, corporate hustlers. While the first half largely focuses on the latter, director Lee Isaac Chung and screenwriter Mark L. Smith tightly integrate Powell into the story. His southern swag, cowboy antics, and explosive fireworks launched from a truck that seems to have been designed by MI6’s Buc-ee’s branch make the adventure worth the price of admission.
I won’t spoil the fun, but you can guess much of what happens after Kate and Tyler meet. Cinephiles may find that Powell’s recent explosive chemistry with Sweeney and Adria Arjona overshadows his pairing with Edgar-Jones, but their dynamic will work for most moviegoers.
Aside from Powell’s screen presence, Twisters’ strength lies in its seamless integration of cutting edge CGI and practical effects. A key highlight is a chilling sequence where a tornado devastates a motel while Kate and Tyler scramble to get the manager and patrons to safety, immersing you in the chaos, particularly on an IMAX screen. The film delivers its coup de grâce in the third act when an EF5 ravages a small-town movie theater right as the legendary “It’s alive!” scene from 1931’s Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff plays on the screen. This moment of pure cinematic bliss reminds us of the perils of man toying with nature.
The natural disaster subgenre is inherently difficult to begin with, and it becomes especially tricky to pull off in a heated political environment. Twisters navigates this challenge by showcasing the storms’ devastation without, to the chagrin of some critics, explicitly blaming climate change. Instead, the movie explores harnessing human ingenuity — an approach that, while theoretically possible, lies beyond our technological limitations — to, as the characters put it, tame tornadoes. This is a prudent narrative choice, given the inconclusive science. Divisive eco-lectures would have made the film unsalvageable, even with Powell’s charisma.
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