Twisters - Movie Review

The Movie: Twisters

The Director: Lee Isaac Chung

The Cast: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell, Anthony Ramos, Brandon Perea, Maura Tierney, Sasha Lane.

The Story: A retired tornado-chaser and meteorologist is persuaded to return to Oklahoma to work with a new team and new technologies.

The Rating: 7 / 10

The Review:

Okay, Hollywood, we get it. Glen Powell is a movie star. He's good looking, he has charisma, and he's a good enough actor to pull of a wide variety of characters all while bringing in box office numbers. I do like the guy and I feel like he's going to have a long and successful career although I have to say that overexposure might be creeping in just a little. In the last two years, we've seen him in Top Gun: Maverick, Devotion, Hit Man, Anything But You and now the sequel to Twister, the 1996 blockbuster original that blew away the competition and stormed its way to box office supremacy. I don't see this as a major issue yet, I just hope audiences don't get tired of him so soon after his seemingly sudden rise to prominence.

With all that out of the way, I have to say that this movie was a lot of fun and is pretty much exactly what I was looking for and hoping it would be. In a cinema landscape that constantly sees massive scale destruction and devastation with the earth, the galaxy, and all of existence constantly in peril, it was nice to see a more grounded story that gave room to focus on the people and not just the spectacle of it all. This also gave Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones plenty of room to show off their star power and their acting abilities as well as the chemistry they shared together which, for me, is a lot of the reason why this movie works so well.

The supporting cast is also in on the fun with Anthony Ramos doing his thing, the soon to be Superman David Corenswet flexing his abilities, and Maura Tierney bringing that motherly presence which served as a reminder for me just how long I've been watching movies. It was also nice to see Sasha Lane again, she's an amazing actress that seems to just pop up randomly here and there. The whole vibe of the movie is very fun and fast paced and the way the cast plays off of each other really helps with that. There's some great character rivalries that play out over the course of the story and it's interesting to see how they all end up working together in different ways.

I mentioned earlier how this movie isn't going to have excessively mind blowing special effects and I was totally okay with that. What we do get is just enough to show lots of tornado action and it's more about showing the actual devastation that takes place and the toll on human lives than just blowing everything up because it's fun. I think that's why I'm giving the story a little higher rating that it otherwise mght have earned. You see how real lives are at stake and, from the beginning, you see how anyone and everyone is in real danger. No unbeatable superhero antics going on here.

This also makes the movie a very worthy sequel to the original, which starred Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, even if there were only a couple minor threads of connective tissue between them. Overall, this movie is exactly what you want a summer blockbuster to be, a non stop action movie filled with larger than life personalities and big screen worthy special effects. This is one of those movies that you want the biggest screen and the biggest bucket of popcorn you can find to get the biggest bang for your buck.