My Kingdom for Helen Hunt

I could really go for a flying cow sailing across a movie screen right about now.

Sometimes you just want to watch a big ridiculous movie. Nothing too demanding, just the right balance of silliness, thrilly-ness and action.

In previous years, Jason Statham has done the trick, whether he’s keeping bees or fighting monster sharks.

Alas, there is no new Statham movie this year, so we are forced to make do with 35-year-old Spy Kids alumnus Glen Powell. He’s cute and all, but he’s no Stat-hammy. Boooo!

I was hoping Powell’s latest movie Twisters, the revisitation of the 1996 hit Twister, would provide some welcome cinematic summer fare. The original Twister featured Bill Paxton, Helen Hunt and, of course, a famous flying cow. Unfortunately, big silly fun is nowhere to be found in the somewhat relentless new iteration.

The action gets off to a roaring start with a group of college kids chasing storms in the flattened expanse of Middle America. Led by the intrepid Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones), they set off determined to get grant money and field test Kate’s thesis that injecting enough sodium polyacrylate (the critical ingredient in diapers) into the whirling heart of a tornado will suck the juice out of the thing, causing it to dissipate.

Anyone who has ever dealt with a child in diapers knows that no matter how hard you try, stuff is going to come blasting out. So it is here as well. The storm that Kate chases with her team turns out to be more than they can handle. Tragedy ensues with a big wet whoosh.

Flash forward five years, and Kate has grown up and gotten a desk job in New York and is safely away from tornadoes. Unless you count the sample sale at Bergdorf’s.

A surprise visit from her old college friend and former colleague Javi (Anthony Ramos) rekindles Kate’s love of storm chasing. Javi’s new startup is making use of military technology to collect data on tornadoes that may help predict them. This information could be life-saving for those living in the middle of tornado country, but he needs Kate’s weather-chasing instincts to track down the right twister.

Despite her reservations, Kate joins the team and heads back to Oklahoma to confront the winds of her history and lay a few spirits to rest.

‘Twisters’ vs. ‘Twister’

Director Lee Isaac Chung (Minari) does what he can to imbue the film with authentic flavour, peppering the soundtrack with country songs and epic vistas.

Most of the Texas tang and twang comes from Powell, who plays tornado wrangler and good ol’ boy Tyler Owens. Tall of hat and purty as a sunflower, Owens is a former rodeo buckaroo, meteorologist and contemporary YouTube celebrity. His main means of communication is a sustained series of “Whoo-hoos!”

Owens is an eyeful and a mouthful. And Kate puts up a good fight against his southern charms. But love is in the air, and just like the storms on the horizon, it’s picking up speed.

The original Twister spent a good portion of its run time establishing the complex, sometimes thorny relationships between the principal characters.

The couple at the centre of the original movie are on the eve of divorce, but they secretly harbour squishy feelings for each other. After destruction sweeps the film and tiny towns are blown off the face of the map, passion finally breaks through the clouds.

In rewatching the 1996 film, I was pleasantly surprised by some of the more nuanced meditations on friendships, loyalty and mutual obsession that mostly come from the ensemble cast (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Cary Elwes, Jami Gertz and Todd Field, who went on to direct Tár).

By comparison, Twisters does little to invest personality into its group of storm chasers. It’s a little odd, as such films live and die on an audience caring about which characters live and die.

Other than the two toothsome leads, the rest of the cast is so generic and thinly drawn that it’s hard to tell them apart. When they are sucked into a whirling vortex, the most one can offer is a meek “Oh, well.”

Nothing like the real thing

To be fair, there is a fair amount of blockbuster movie action: the wholesale destruction from the storms features trailer parks and livestock picked up and whirled around. But it all feels so programmed and prescriptive that it might as well have been made by AI algorithms. The humans have little to do but hunker down and avoid getting blown away.

Real storms are infinitely more exciting. And it’s hard not to exit the theatre feeling strangely cheated by Twisters.

While I was visiting Montreal last summer, an actual tornado took place. It was something to behold. The emergency alert sounded that morning, telling people to seek shelter if they saw threatening weather.

A few hours went by and another trumpeting text message alert came in, this time with information that the storm had morphed into a marine tornado, which often came wreathed in clouds and rain.

Even as I was reading the message, I looked over to the north and saw what looked like a solid wall of black clouds advancing across the city. My chin dropped.

A large part of the thrill of storm watching is anticipation, and this was true in Montreal. As I watched the advancing clouds like an army of darkness sweeping across the city skyline, a species of glee took over.

Perpendicular sheets of rain flooded the streets within minutes. As people fled in panic, my excitement only grew. Doomy gloom at midday descended, lit only by lightning strikes across the city.

I watched it all, utterly riveted. When it was over, I went out for soup dumplings. As the blue summer sky re-emerged, the people who had been caught in the storm came peeking out, wet to the skin but cheerful in the freshly washed sunlight.

In film as in life, anticipation is often the very best part of an experience.

Twisters has lots of stuff whirling around: explosions, fireballs, people getting sucked into the sky. But it lacks genuine excitement, or even unexpected twists and turns. And no flying cows at all. Is that too much to ask for?

Whether they’re marine tornadoes, hurricanes or atmospheric rivers, the power and frequency of such natural disasters aren’t the rarities they once were.

Today in the real world, Houston, Texas, is still suffering the effects of Hurricane Beryl. And Toronto recently endured another record-setting storm.

The verboten word in Twisters is, of course, climate change. The film goes to extraordinary lengths to tiptoe around the subject. It is alluded to in coyest fashion, but never stated outright. A chickenshit stance if ever there was one.

There isn’t a lot to get thrilled about in Twisters. The most genuinely frightening films about the catastrophic power of an angry planet are all documentaries. There’s a twist for you.

‘Twisters’ is now screening in major theatres.