Twisters review: buckle up for the ride

Twisters is a decent action thriller about tornado chasers. It’s nail biting fun with lots of menacing special effects as long as you aren’t too nitpicky about the details. Willing suspension of disbelief helps you just enjoy the thrills and have a good time.

Twisters stars Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kate, a woman who has an innate instinct (combined with a lifetime to study) about tornadoes. Where they will form, where they are headed, how bad they will be.

While Kate was still in school, she had an idea for how to tame a tornado. When the film begins she’s out chasing tornadoes with a crew that included Javi (Anthony Ramos) and several other friends. They got up close with a tornado in order to test her theory about how to stop one. Things went horribly wrong. Several of her friends died.

After that, she quit chasing tornadoes and moved to New York where she worked as a meteorologist. Five years later Javi showed up and asked her to help him with some new technology that would give them some much needed info about tornadoes.

She agreed to return to Oklahoma with him, but only for a week.

She saw what Javi had and thought it could give them useful information. The tornado chasers were joined by a YouTube famous tornado chaser named Tyler (Glen Powell) who had a whole group of followers hanging on his every word. He kept getting to storms before Kate and Javi could. There was an English newspaperman, Ben (Harry Hadden-Paton), following Tyler around to write a story about storm chasers.

After chasing around Oklahoma following several dangerous and destructive storms, Kate began to see that Tyler actually knew what he was doing. They started to cooperate.

Kate went to visit her mother, (Maura Tierney). Tyler figured out where she’d gone and followed here there. At her home, he saw her material from her long ago project to tame tornadoes. He thought it might work. He wanted to test it again with some additions of his own.

So off they go in search of another tornado.

I thought the storm sequences were pretty good. Just scary enough. Cars and buildings and people flying through the air looked reasonably real. I liked that Kate was the acknowledged expert and not one of the men. I liked that the story didn’t turn into a romance.

I’m pretty sure that storm chasers are insane. That’s not a clinical diagnosis, but honestly what they do is nuts.

There were some secondary parts with actors like Sasha Lane, Tunde Adebimpe, Katy O’Brien, and David Corenswet but none of their characters were well developed. A minor plot involving Javi’s actual job mission was added to help bring Kate and Tyler closer to working together.

Peacock has Twisters streaming. When it was in theaters you could see it in 3D. That would be fun for a film like this with things flying everywhere in the wind.

If you’ve watched this one, I’d love to hear what you thought about it. The comments are open.