Director: Lee Isaac Chung
Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Maura Tierney
Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Took me more than a few weeks to get around to it. For this whole time I just wasn’t excited by a sequel to Twister (1996).
Did I Like It: In a word, no.
I like that the climax of the film (spoilers) takes place in a movie theater, although I don’t love so much that it is at least possible in the Twister-verse, a 35mm print of Frankenstein (1931) accessible to theaters in Oklahoma perished under the tantrum of an F5 cyclone.
Anything else, I’m pretty not wild about.
The original Twister wasn’t exactly a thinking man’s thriller, but it had a breezy (pun not intended, but I accept your condemnations), unassuming quality that makes it likable enough. The cast though was a murderer’s row of interesting character actors. The cast here is—with the exception of Ramos—drab and boring. Powell is handsome and charming, and I spent several seconds thinking thinking that David Corenswet should be playing Superman before I remembered that he is, in fact, on deck to perform that very task.
There are other, deeper problems with the cast. I like Maura Tierney. I watched NewsRadio and the later seasons of ER just like everyone else should. But you’re never going to convince me that her role was originally supposed to be played by another performer, but Helen Hunt said no after the producers had any sort of inclination to fundamentally re-work the beats of their script.
There’s an ounce of freedom if—even if it is by necessity—that the film doesn’t feel compelled to be slavishly devoted to what came before as many legacy sequels can’t seem to help. As a matter of fact, the only slight reference to the original in the entire film is a Dorothy doppler device in the film’s opening scene that is judged to be past its prime.
If only the film could somehow overcome an absolutely plague of “As you know, Bob” dialogue. The original Twister had the good sense to bring along someone who didn’t know anything about tornados to be a receptive vessel for exposition. Here, everyone has a advanced degrees in meteorology, but feel the need to tell everyone else about every little thing that happens.
Somehow, I came out of Twisters not only finding it kind of an eye-rolling bore, but it made me realize I may owe Jan de Bont an apology for spending the better part of thirty years rolling my eyes at a movie better than its reputation.