Most disaster movies are not actually about disasters. The good ones anyway. They are more about the people caught up in the thick of a disaster, and what happens when they crash into each other as everything around them is crashing down.
“Twisters,” the quasi-sequel to the 1996 blockbuster, mostly understands this. At its heart is the blossoming relationship between two Oklahoma storm chasers who end up chasing each other.
And their meet cute? Driving pickup trucks into tornados.
Our first lovelorn storm hound is Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones). We’re told over and over she’s the best in the biz, with a talent for predicting storms, although the opening scene begs to differ. In it, she misreads a storm and leads a group of grad-student friends into the mouth of a monster. She lives to regret it.
That is, until she runs into the chiseled jaw of a different beast, the magnetic Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a self-proclaimed “tornado wrangler” who shoots fireworks into twisters for his YouTube channel. In the world of this movie, his stunt is inspired by viewers who want to know if it’s possible. Apparently, the scene itself was inspired by real-life storm chasers armed with mortars.
The filmmakers did consult professional storm chasers, which explains the accurate lingo characters spew throughout, but not the implausible concept driving Kate: Tornadoes can be stopped with diaper gel. As my movie companion whispered, “So you’re telling me this is about killing tornados with the same thing that soaks up baby pee?”
Yes, yes it is.
But it’s also not. The fireworks scene is where the film’s will-they, won’t-they, of-course-they-will love story takes off. Kate has teamed up with an old buddy and his well-financed crew of scientists, each one bearing more governmental abbreviations than personality. They’re hoping to test and build new tornado forecasting models during a “once in a generation” storm cycle.
Hoping to add more YouTube followers and get his adrenaline fix is Tyler. He rolls up in a fortified Ram pickup with cameras and fireworks blazing. As a fan of the original, I immediately like Tyler’s ragtag crew of well-meaning influencers, hawking Tornado Wrangler mugs and t-shirts reading “Not My First Tornado.” They remind me of Helen Hunt’s gang. All they’re missing is Philip Seymour Hoffman, who could take a bit part and make it sing. Kate’s friend Javi (Anthony Ramos of “Hamilton” fame) comes close, except he’s playing for the wrong side.
Kate and Tyler trade flirty banter. We learn he’s a former rodeo cowboy with a brain. She pretends not to like him. But we know she does, and soon enough they’re chasing each other into the next tornado, this time a twin. (The references to the original film are subtle, but director Lee Isaac Chung can’t help himself. Can you blame him?)
The two survive to trade more banter, then it’s on to a tornado at a rodeo, and then a tornado that tears through a refinery, which makes the fireworks tornado look like a matchstick next to a blowtorch.
“Twisters” is a bona fide sequel in that everything is bigger and badder than the original. It is also more violent. At least six people get sucked up into tornadoes, never to be seen again. This dulls the few beats when Isaac Chung tries to show the human toll of a deadly storm. It even dulls Tyler’s most redeeming quality: That his crew is selling schlocky merch to support small towns ravaged by disaster.
But the love story. And twisters. That’s what we are here for, and they mostly deliver. The two leads have decent chemistry, making scientific jargon sound like pillow talk. They continually impress each other, from a personal revelation at the rodeo, to a close call in an abandoned swimming pool, right up to the moment they solve, together, the flaw in her diaper gel scheme.
Which leaves me with one question for the Tornado Wrangler: Can you make a baby in a tornado?