Daisy Edgar-Jones, Anthony Ramos, and Glen Powell in Twisters
TWISTERS
In director Lee Isaac Chung's disaster thriller, you sense them coming, but you're never quite prepared for them. They dominate the screen. They annihilate everything in their path. They leave you awestruck by Hollywood magic. I am, of course, referring to the dimpled grins of Glen Powell. The twisters in Twisters aren't bad, either.
You kind of have to feel sorry for the effects team behind Chung's standalone sequel to 1996's Twister. More than $100 million and untold hours of labor spent crafting über-realistic scenes of cataclysmic weather events, and what patrons will likely want to talk about most is the nearly ridiculous charisma of the movie's lead. (At the weekend screening I attended with my folks, Mom's first words exiting the theater were, “Who is that handsome actor?”) But Powell, here, is actually a perfect representation of the Twisters experience as a whole: eminently watchable, enjoyably cheeky, deeply (if sometimes cloyingly) sincere, and obviously eager to give audiences a great time. Like Jan de Bont's omnipresent cable-TV staple, Chung's outing isn't without elements to make you roll your eyes, be they the cartoon-like nature of random doltish figures or the motivational anthropomorphizing of our titular antagonists: “They're coming after our families.” Refreshingly, however, this old-school entertainment not only acknowledges but embraces its clichés, allowing you to dig the film as both modern blockbuster and charming throwback to the more simplistic, less oppressive summertime kicks of 30-ish years ago.
Although there's no character crossover in Chung's and screenwriter Mark L. Smith's followup (unless you count the return of the data-gathering machine named “Dorothy”), there's plenty of familiarity in terms of narrative, starting with the inevitable Tragic Prelude. In this one, graduate student and fledgling meteorologist Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and her colleague Javi Rivera (Anthony Ramos) lose three friends, one of whom is Kate's beau, to an ultra-intense EF5 tornado in their native Oklahoma – a tragedy that Kate blames on her misreading of warning signs. Cut to five years later, with Kate now working for the National Weather Service in New York, and Javi, arriving from Florida, eager to recruit his estranged friend and longtime crush for a humanitarian effort in their increasingly twister-filled home state. In the manner of generations of haunted heroes with traumatic pasts, Kate grudgingly agrees to assist Javi for a week, and after they arrive in Oklahoma, they're reminded that storm chasing, 28 years after de Bont's thriller, is now a cottage industry. Sites of potential future destruction are teeming with onlookers and YouTubers and merch peddlers, the most noxious of whom appears to be Powell's Tyler Owens, an aggressively brazen “tornado wrangler” with a support team of lovable misfits, a video channel, and his face emblazoned on T-shirts. Kate finds him crass and arrogant. Tyler finds her snooty and humorless. Can two gorgeous, temperamentally mismatched weather fanatics share a panhandle without driving each other crazy?
Indeed they can, at least after a while, but the challenge would've been a lot more fun for audiences if Kate weren't conceived and portrayed as such a mope. Given that she's still grieving the deaths from that Tragic Prelude (and losing co-stars Daryl McCormack and Kiernan Shipka after only one scene definitely counts as a loss), Kate's general dourness makes sense as a personality trait. It doesn't, however, do her fractious rom-com sparring with Tyler any favors, and leaves Powell with no one to match his magnetic swagger; unlike with Sydney Sweeney in Anyone but You and Adria Arjona in Hit Man, he's flirting in a void. Edgar-Jones is a beautiful, naturally empathetic presence, and she gives a decent-enough performance. Yet she isn't able to make Kate interesting, and especially in scenes with the fantastically authentic Maura Tierney as Kate's seen-it-all mother, she's never remotely believable as a native Oklahoman. (She's as unconvincing here as when playing the backwoods heroine of 2022's Where the Crawdads Sing.) I really hope that Edgar-Jones, a native Brit, soon ends her years-long love affair with American dialects, because they seem to be draining her of energy. Or maybe she's simply expending so much energy on the dialects that they're preventing her from connecting with characters the way she did in her aching, startlingly raw Normal People breakout of 2020.
That being said, most viewers won't be at Twisters for the humans – even though Chung offers up a splendid collection of them. Beyond Tierney and the bashfully touching Ramos, the supporting cast features the talents of Sasha Lane, Tunde Adebimpe, Katy O'Brien, David Corenswet, James Paxton (son of original Twister star Bill) as an unreasonable motel guest, and Nope scene stealer Brandon Perea, who's essentially cast in the Philip Seymour Hoffman role and is adorable in it. Still, the most eye-catching second bananas are, naturally, the twisters themselves, and they put on a terrific show. Composer Benjamin Wallfish's score, like Mark Mancina's in 1996, does too much heavy lifting in telling us precisely what we're supposed to feel with every new appearance of the phenomena: apprehension with this one, majestic wonder with the next, edge-of-your-seat terror with the one after that. Yet the effects deliver the goods.
While decades of natural-disaster documentaries, TV-news footage, and home videos have made the witnessing of tornadoes commonplace – no doubt depressingly so for those affected by them – they remain an astounding spectacle, and Chung and his technical crew deliver memorably intense reproductions of these whirlwinds. Even more effective is the mass demolition they cause, with the film's most knuckle-tightening sequences taking place at an oil refinery, a rodeo, the floor of a drained swimming pool, and, delightfully and perversely, the interior of a downtown cinema. When one of our heroes ordered that the citizenry be herded into that locale, the better to keep safe from the impending devastation, I laughed: “Of course movie-makers are telling us that the safest place to be is in a movie theater.” The joke was on me, though. Like the film-phobic twister in '96 that annihilated a drive-in during a screening of The Shining, the one here doesn't appear too keen on letting James Whale's Frankenstein run without incident, either.
Considering that his only prior involvement with big-budget enterprises found him directing a 2023 episode of The Mandalorian, and that his previous feature was 2020's low-key, Oscar-winning family drama Minari, I was surprised that Chung pulled off his elaborate action set pieces with such panache. He may not be an inventive helmer of blockbusters (yet), but he positions the camera wisely for maximum tension, and seems to have a smart sense of the genre's excitement-to-corn ratio, nicely doling out the mandated sentimentality in between blasts of chaos. What likely netted Chung the Twisters gig was his unmissable affinity for the Oklahoma locales and their residents, evidenced by the time and care he takes in surveying the damage done by those recklessly catastrophic winds. His parents being native South Koreans, the American-born Chung spent much of his upbringing in Arkansas, and beneath the Hollywood sheen of this prototypical blockbuster sequel, there's a moving human drama at its core. While it's not a political work (the term “climate change” is never spoken), the film feels like the product of a director wholly aware that worldwide weather conditions are worsening, and equally aware of those willing to exploit natural-disaster-related suffering, particularly among those in disaster-prone areas, for profit. In a true break from genre norm, Chung appears to legitimately care about the fates of the people on-screen, and you sense his delight when Tyler and company prove not to be the fame- and money-grubbers Kate (and we) initially pegged them as.
In many ways, Twisters is like the best '90s-summer-blockbuster that summers in the '90s never gave us. It allows equal time for state-of-the-art visuals and humans in all their messy, weirdo glory; it dives into the recitation of scientific gobbledygook without getting mired in it; it blends groaner gags with moments of unanticipated verbal and visual wit; it exudes heart rather than “heart.” And with all due deference to Sam Neill, Bill Pullman, the late great Bill Paxton, and their peers, it provides, in Glen Powell, a star of such commanding affability that you smile every damned time he does. To date, no one in 2024 movies has looked like he's having quite as much fun as Powell is here – unless it's Powell in Hit Man – and the killer time he's having is infectious. I'm also not sure I've ever before seen a star so definitively embrace and explode a cliché. In one scene, Tyler is searching for a missing dog amid the rubble, and the next time she sees him, Kate asks if he wound up finding the pup. Powell's simultaneously high-comic and matter-of-fact reply belongs in the pantheon of great lines uttered in films, like this one, whose audience is always more invested in a canine's safety than a human's: “Of course I did.”
ODDITY
I never would've imagined writing this 20 years ago, or even five years ago. But there is currently no type of film I'd rather see than the Unheralded Indie Horror Flick. We generally get at least a few winners under that unofficial umbrella label per year, but the output in '24 has been positively obscene – sometimes both figuratively and literally. Longlegs, Late Night with the Devil, Out of Darkness, Immaculate, Night Swim … . Even the largely repellent In a Violent Nature had an undeniable hook (one also both figurative and literal), and while not horror movies per se, I Saw the TV Glow and Tuesday certainly boasted moments that freaked me the eff out. The latest in this year's lineup of high-quality, low-budget chillers is writer/director Damian Mc Carthy's Oddity, which features only eight characters – two of them played by the same actor – and precisely two settings: a spacious, rambling Irish home in the country, and a cramped, dingy Irish insane asylum in town. For just over 90 minutes, I was deliriously unsettled in both locales.
While renovating their recently purchased money pit, Dani Timmis (Carolyn Bracken), the wife of psychiatrist Ted (Gwilym Lee), hears a knock at the door, and opens the viewing window to see a crazed man with wild hair and a milky glass eye (Tadhg Murphy's Olin). He warns Dani that someone entered her home when she left the door open, and demands to be let in to protect her from the potential threat. Dani refuses … or so it seems, because a jump cut to a year later reveals that the woman was indeed murdered in her house that night. Olin was consequently convicted of and imprisoned for the crime, after which, through mysterious circumstances, his head was found smashed in on an asylum floor. But Dani's twin sister Darci (also played by Bracken), who is both legitimately blind and allegedly psychic, isn't convinced that Olin was the killer, and shows up at the still-unfinished rural dwelling to persuade Ted and his new girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton) that the murderer is still at large. Oh yeah, and Darci brings with her an adult-sized wooden mannequin, his expression contorted into a Munch-like scream, that helps her divine hidden information. Because of course it does.
What we essentially have in Oddity is a drawing-room mystery-thriller in the Agatha Christie vein, though the author would likely have taken to her fainting couch at first sight of Olin's gory remains. Yet Mc Carthy's film's isn't much of a whodunit, given that if you exclude the deceased Olin, the list of suspects in Dani's killing can be boiled down to exactly two: Ted, who jumped into a new live-in relationship awfully quickly after his wife's brutal slaying, and Ivan (Steve Wall), the orderly at Ted's psychiatric hospital who seems untrustworthy and brutal from the get-go. (With Menton uncannily resembling the Kate Winslet of 20 years ago, Yana is let off on a pass, as she seems too confused and irrationally pissy to be a good murderer.) What the movie is, instead, is a superb exercise in delayed information.
On numerous occasions, notably in that terrifying opener, we come thisclose to witnessing the full extents of treachery and violence only for them to be saved for later dramatic reveals. The details behind Dani's killing, for instance, aren't disclosed until we're an hour-plus into the movie; a sensible plan, due to the presence of a telegraphed trap door, takes 10 minutes to go from benign to nightmarish; and an offhanded reference to a hotel's purportedly haunted reception bell lands its priceless punchline mere seconds before the end credits. (“Punchline” is the correct word for it, by the way; against all expectation, this fright film is teeming with jokes, and excellent ones, at that.) The canny, sometimes deliberately cruel editing makes Mc Carthy's quiet little stunner feel more expansive than most eight-character/two-set outings ever do. And with its nerve-jangling sound design, solid jump scares, and enticing performances across the board – in her dual roles, Bracken is especially fine – this is as much fun as I've had at an Unheralded Indie Horror Flick since … . Well, since Nicolas Cage weirded us all out a mere week ago. In truth, I had considerably more fun at this thing. Longlegs, however, is still making serious box-office bank, while Oddity hasn't yet cleared $1 million. Genre fans should make a point of rectifying that.
