Uninspired disaster flick Twisters is gone with the wind

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• Twisters
• Directed by Lee Isaac Chung
• Written by Mark L. Smith
• Starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell and Anthony Ramos
• Classification PG; 122 minutes
• Opens in theatres July 19

Twisters has no flying cows; no one tossing a random squeaky bear at a pickup truck’s windshield after it had just plowed through a country house like roadkill; no one explaining the physics behind “the suck zone” with the zest for life that the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character Dusty had unleashed on the 1996 original.

The sequel to Twister – which pluralizes the title, while following the same beats as its predecessor – is serviceable. But it also misses what made director Jan de Bont’s disaster spectacle such chaotic fun to begin with.

If the earlier Twister felt like it was made with the same ragged and giddy energy that drives the storm chasers played by Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, the new one is more akin to a polished, no-expense-spared approximation. The kind of thing you’d expect from their copycat rival – the sneering corporate-backed sellout (played by Cary Elwes) who takes himself far too seriously.

I’m not trying to make Twisters director Lee Isaac Chung out to be a studio-backed villain hijacking something pure and original from mavericks. The first movie was as formulaic as they come, resurrecting the disaster movie with a massive budget (for its time), not to mention Speed director de Bont behind the wheel. Meanwhile Chung, a rather surprising choice as successor, is coming off his delicate Oscar-nominated coming-of-age film Minari, which is also set in the American southwest.

With Twisters, he attempts to wrangle the thrills of the original into something more reverential and earnest. And he occasionally succeeds with moments when the film seems to breathe in the scenery; or when Daisy Edgar-Jones gives us this movie’s answer to tornado-whisperer action. Remember when Paxton’s character, Bill Harding, sifted dust through his hand, watching its movement toward the ground, to predict the weather like a human barometer? Edgar-Jones levels up by plucking a dandelion, gently floating her hands between its seeds as they hover in the air. That moment transcends the hokeyness of the original and becomes rather soulful instead.

Edgar-Jones’ Kate is an EF5 survivor. For those who don’t remember, that’s the tornado category Hunt’s Jo held a personal vendetta against, after it sucked up her father as a child. But Kate responds to her traumatic run-in with the EF5 not by chasing tornadoes, but hiding from them.

She works in a New York office, monitoring weather patterns, until Anthony Ramos’s Javi talks her back into the field. He lures her with new state-of-the-art tech that could study and predict tornadoes with more accuracy than the floating metallic Christmas ornaments from the original. So this time around, we’re riding shotgun in Oklahoma with the corporate-backed storm chasers, as if entering the same story but from the opposite end. (Is this a wink from the filmmakers acknowledging the movie’s whole vibe?)

Glen Powell leads the seemingly antagonistic crew; the ones bringing back as much of the “heehaw” energy that Bill and Jo’s outfit had in the original as they can. They even signed renewed leases on red pickups and caravans to complete the look.

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Powell and Edgar-Jones, both far too unbelievably good looking to play people obsessed with wind patterns, work up a googly-eyed affection that’s more suited for novelist Nicholas Sparks (think The Longest Ride) than a movie about extreme weather making tossed salad out of real estate. And there really isn’t much chemistry between them. Edgar-Jones, as lowkey charming as she is, is just too soft in the role. Powell does a lot of the heavy lifting, just to give this movie a pulse.

Chung tends to favour smaller moments that fall within his comfort zone. But his stab at telling a more convincingly dramatic human story just gets in the way. That’s especially true when it comes to the bleeding-heart subplot in Twisters touching on “disaster vultures” – investors who take advantage of affected communities by scooping up their real estate at a bargain. The movie simply doesn’t commit enough to make those scenes touching on a real concerning trend count for much.

And as far as the spectacle goes, it’s all familiar without feeling as visceral. De Bont’s Twister relied heavily on practical effects while using computer-generated imagery (CGI), which was still new and awe-inspiring at the time, to conjure the tornadoes. Nearly three decades later, Chung has nothing new to offer but a couple nifty combustible CGI tornadoes and reverent twists on the original.

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In the first movie’s most famous sequence, a drive-in theatre playing The Shining has its screen ripped out. This time, a small-town repertory cinema has its entire wall torn out. The people in the cinema are in the tornado’s suck zone, pulling them toward it through the space where the screen used to be, as if they’re being consumed by the movie. If only.