It is impossible to doze through Twisters

Twisters is an action-disaster film that follows “storm-chasers” and is so relentless in its own pursuit of tornadoes that plot, character and dialogue are also thrown to the wind. It has a classy cast (Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell) and a classy director (Lee Isaac Chung) but if you believe, as I do, that once you’ve seen one big storm you’ve seen them all don’t expect any mercy. This never lets you off the hook and is so furiously and incessantly loud that a doze is impossible. God knows I tried.

This film never lets you off the hook and is so furiously loud that a doze is impossible. God knows I tried

That may be too harsh. The film does what it says on the tin, which is subject you to extremely bad weather over and over. You think tornadoes are rare events? Think again, as in Oklahoma there seems to be a violent, crashing one every two minutes.

There must be a market for it as thisl is a remake of the 1996 film Twister although, in this instance, it’s been written by Mark L. Smith (rather than Michael Crichton) and directed by Chung, who is the biggest surprise of this endeavor. He, you may remember, wrote and directed Minari, that gorgeously slow, gentle and sensitive film about a South Korean immigrant family trying to make it as farmers in Arkansas. I do wonder now: was he always eyeing up grandma and imagining how she might be lashed with rain and hurled into the air? Was this film in him even then?

It’s not the sort of thing you’d expect from him, but here we are. And here’s Edgar-Jones playing Kate, a storm-chasing scientist who, her mother will later tell us, “always loved weather.” Other choice lines include “if you feel it you should chase it,” and “you don’t face your fears, you ride ‘em” — and “you’re no fun since you were struck by lightning” which, to be fair, I get. I don’t think I’d be as much fun if I were struck by lightning.  The bravura prologue has Kate and her crew driving though Tornado Valley in Oklahoma to test a system she’s invented to make tornadoes wither and die. You shoot polymers into them from big barrels, I think — I’m not sure I properly kept up with the science — and “it decreases the moisture and makes them collapse.” But the tornado they encounter does not wither and die. Instead, it kills three of the crew, including her boyfriend. Bummer.

Cut to five years later when Kate, now a meteorologist based in New York, is enticed back on to the road as tornadoes are becoming more and more frequent, even if no one is asking why. This time Kate must grapple with the YouTubers, who are in it for clicks. They are “hillbillies,” and foremost among them is Tyler (Powell), the self-described “tornado wrangler.” Kate’s a PhD (nearly) and he’s uncouth, so romance can’t be on the cards. Or can it?

The set pieces, which combine CGI with live-action — and really put the cast through it, apparently — somehow do not induce wonder. Grass whispers, trees rustle, skies darken, flying debris smashes windscreens, trucks roll and, by the end, oil refineries are blowing up and whole towns are being razed (with no human casualties, interestingly). But it’s so unceasing it becomes repetitive.

Though the directing is perfunctory, the cast bring some B-movie panache to proceedings. Powell is an insanely charming screen presence while Edgar-Jones is winning — even if she deserves better and should probably have signed up with Paul Mescal’s agent. Mescal hasn’t put a foot wrong since Normal People and never has to fight bad weather. The bottom line here is: if tornado films are the sort of film you like, you will like this. And let’s leave it there — on that patronizing note.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.