Twisters

Sometimes legacy sequels don’t need to be heavy-handed in their return to what made them popular, and this sequel seems to understand that… mostly.

Taking place decades after the original film, Twisters is a stand-alone sequel that follows all-new characters — like main protagonist Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) — as they continue to study the swirling vortexes of death that are tornadoes. Given the opportunity to test out some state-of-the-art weather tracking technology years after a work-related disaster saw her lose her entire team to a freak tornado event, Kate temporarily joins a crew staffed by the company, Storm Par, unsure of where this new path may take her. Arriving in Oklahoma, Kate is soon met by viral star and “tornado wrangler” Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a big personality who soon becomes Kate’s charming rival. As work begins tracking a predicted tornado outbreak, Kate must confront her past while trying to survive Mother Nature and a personal and professional plight she’s ill-prepared to solve.

A fun, breezy ride for most of its runtime, Twisters, like Twister before it, really lives and dies by its cast of characters, especially since the somewhat rehashed “tornado chasers” plot is even thinner than what we got the first time around (though no less enjoyable). Balanced in its tone despite the lack of narrative weight, it’s Kate and Tyler’s slow burn of a relationship along with the general excitement of seeing them at work that makes this one worthy of what came before. Add enough thrills, humor, and solid performances to round everything out in a satisfying way, and Twisters is a surprisingly good legacy sequel that doesn’t ruin the nostalgia-inducing memories of the first, with the audience’s general feelings about both coming down to a matter of preference.

Following in the original’s footsteps by being a completely average film bolstered by its stellar casting and wild premise, Twisters, also like its predecessor, suffers from similar pacing issues wrapped in a story that’s serviceable at best — the character work luckily evening things out a bit. Padded by inconsequential and cheesy moments that feel like they’re there for the hell of it and relying a bit too heavily on set pieces that feel slightly less impactful thanks to some oddly middling special effects (the non-tornado stunts look great, however), and my problems with this one luckily aren’t deal-breakers, mainly because I expected there to be more being the 90s-era flick it is.

Twisters won’t disappoint fans of the first film but it won’t exactly wow them either, making this one a perfectly acceptable way to give a movie that never needed a sequel a follow-up that hits more than it misses. And while it’s true that some of the computer-generated effects don’t always look the best and the overall script feels a bit safe at times, Twisters still manages to find a happy middle ground that does enough to stand on its own while honoring what came before, resulting in an enjoyable piece of popcorn entertainment that could have turned out far worse.