TWISTERS (2024) **

Twister was one of those movies that played like gangbusters opening night in the theater with a packed house that didn’t hold up to close scrutiny at home on the small screen.  Maybe that’s why it took Hollywood… (pulls out my abacus) … 28 years to come up with a sequel.  Now, I didn’t get a chance to see Twisters in theaters this summer.  Since it plays just about as well at home as the original did (which is to say it’s merely okay), I can only surmise it must’ve been a real corker on the big screen. 

Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) invents a doodad that causes tornadoes to evaporate.  However, when she tests it out, something goes wrong and her whole team winds up dead.  Suffering from PTSD (Post Twister Stress Disorder), she quits storm chasing for a desk job at a meteorological center.  Five years later, her former colleague Javi (Anthony Ramos from Transformers:  Rise of the Beasts) lures her back into the tornado chasing game.  Kate soon realizes they are working for a bunch of greedy corporate fat cats and then decides to throw in with Glen (Top Gun:  Maverick) Powell, a hotshot rival tornado “wrangler” and YouTuber to stop an impending storm. 

The lamest part about this sequel is the fact that Edgar-Jones has a sixth sense sort of deal where she can feel tornadoes forming better than any weather map.  That’s basically a lazy screenwriting way of having your main character always be right.  Edgar-Jones is fine in the role, but she isn’t exactly memorable either.  The same can be said for Ramos as her second in command whose main character trait is to cheer her on.  (Suggested Drinking Game:  Take a shot every time he tells her, “You got this”.)  At least Powell injects the proceedings with a little bit of swagger. 

The fatal flaw of the film (like the original) is that bad weather doesn’t exactly make for a good villain.  I know the old man vs. nature trope is as old as time, but there are only so many scenes of people running from tornadoes you can take.  (For a movie about so-called “storm chasers” they sure do spend a lot of the time running the other way.)  As in the original, it mostly fails because the characters are wafer thin and the drama is nominal.  I did like the part where people took shelter in an old theater playing the original Frankenstein though.